Little Foot, one of the world’s most complete hominin fossils, may be a new species of human ancestor, according to research that raises questions about our evolutionary past.
Publicly unveiled in 2017, Little Foot is the most complete Australopithecus skeleton ever found. The foot bones that lend the fossil its name were first discovered in South Africa 1994, leading to a painstaking excavation over 20 years in the Sterkfontein cave system.
Prof Ronald Clarke, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, who led the team that excavated the skeleton, attributed Little Foot to the species Australopithecus prometheus. Others believed it was Australopithecus africanus, a species first described in 1925 and which had previously been found in the same cave system.
Australopithecus – meaning “southern ape”– was a group of hominins that existed in Africa as early as 4.2m years ago.
Students visit Sterkfontein where Little Foot was discovered. Photograph: La Trobe University
But a new study led by Australian researchers, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, has found that Little Foot’s traits differ from both species, raising a third possibility.
“We think it is a formerly unknown, unsampled species of human ancestor,” said Dr Jesse Martin, an adjunct at La Trobe University in Melbourne, who led the research.
“It doesn’t look like Australopithecus prometheus … but it also doesn’t look like all of the africanus to come out of Sterkfontein.”
A map showing the site where Little Foot was discovered. Illustration: La Trobe University
Martin, also a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge, added: “This thing will be part of a lineage of hominins, so it’s possible that we have not just a point in our human family tree that we hadn’t discovered before, but an entire limb of that tree.”
Martin said Clarke was “one of the only people to maintain there were two species of hominin at Sterkfontein”, and had been “proven to be correct” in that regard.
“Where [Clarke] and I depart is I would argue one is definitely not prometheus,” he said.
The researchers identified key differences distinguishing Little Foot from Australopithecus africanus, including a longer nuchal plane – a region at the back of the skull.
“The bottom back of the skull is supposed to be fairly conserved in human evolution, which is to say it doesn’t change that rapidly,” Martin said. “If you find differences between things in the base of the cranium … those differences are more likely to represent different species, because they just don’t change readily, evolutionarily speaking. All of the differences we’ve found are in that region.
“To find evidence hiding in plain sight at Sterkfontain of an entirely new species is kind of remarkable and counterintuitive,” Martin added, given “it is the most complete human ancestral fossil in the record”.
“We should be able to figure out where it sits in the human family tree.”
The study’s authors have not formally reclassified Little Foot, suggesting: “It is more appropriate that a new species be named by the research team that has spent more than two decades excavating and analysing the remarkable Little Foot specimen. We hope they will view our suggestion in this regard as well-intentioned advice.”
There has also been disagreement among scientists about Little Foot’s age. The fossil skeleton has been dated as 3.67m years old, but other scientists have suggested Little Foot cannot be older than 2.8m years.
Prof Ronald Clarke, who discovered the skeleton, has been contacted for comment.
