Scientists have finally come face-to-face with an ancient human ancestor called Little Foot. A new digital reconstruction reveals the visage of one of our oldest close human relatives, researchers report March 2 in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol. The reconstruction offers a step toward better understanding human evolution.
Little Foot is a member of the genus Australopithecus, an important ancestral group to our species’ own genus Homo. The skeleton’s small foot bones were first discovered in 1994 in a box of fossils at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The rest of the skeleton was found encased in rock in the Sterkfontein Caves, about 50 kilometers away, three