The human ancestor “Little Foot” gets a makeover

Scientists have finally come face to face with an ancient human ancestor called Little Foot. A new digital reconstruction reveals the face of one of our oldest close human relatives, researchers report March 2 in the journal Palevol Reports. The reconstruction constitutes a step towards a better understanding of human evolution.

Little Foot is part of the genre Australopithecusan important ancestral group of our species’ own genus Homo. The skeleton’s small foot bones were first discovered in 1994 in a fossil box at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. THE remains of the skeleton was found encased in rock in the Sterkfontein Cavesabout 50 kilometers away, three years later.

Part of the skeleton, including the skull and face, was partially crushed and deformed by the rock. In 2019, researchers scanned the skull using a synchrotron X-ray imaging center in the UK to produce highly detailed models of the bones. They then spent years digitally reconstructing Little Foot’s face.

“We now have a very good reconstruction, which we could not do with the physical specimen,” explains paleoanthropologist Amélie Beaudet of the CNRS in France.

Beaudet and his colleagues compared Little Foot’s facial features to those of three others Australopithecus skulls and features of related apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans. Interestingly, some of Little Foot’s features, such as the distinctly large eye sockets, appear more similar to fossils from East Africa than to those from South Africa, where Little Foot was found. One possible explanation is that Little Foot represents a group of human ancestors who migrated from East Africa to South Africa more than 3.5 million years ago. This might help explain why Little Foot is different from Australopithecus individuals who lived in the same region hundreds of thousands of years later.

But Beaudet warns that with so little Australopithecus When comparing skulls, researchers can’t be sure if this is the reason for Little Foot’s unique appearance. “We only have a few specimens, so we have to be very careful.”

The next steps are to shape Little Foot’s teeth and puzzlewhich will help scientists learn more about this enigmatic human relative and how it helped shape the evolution of the genre. Homosaid Beaudet. “It’s the only way, I think, for us to understand…why we evolved the way we did.”