With its almost-4-million-year-old time stamp, Little Foot rivals the more well-known Lucy skeleton from East Africa. The results are expected to be published next year.įossilized skeletons are a rare find, and complete skeletons are practically unheard of. Since then, the researchers have worked hard to excavate and prepare the fossils for their current display.Ĭlarke, along with other international experts, will soon release more than 25 scientific papers on the research. Little Foot has been covered extensively since Clarke found four of its foot fragments while digging through a box of animal bones from South Africa's Sterkfontein Caves in 1994, and he sent other researchers into the Sterkfontein Caves in July 1997 to look for clues. 'It has a lot of firsts,' Ron Clarke, a paleoanthropologist who contributed to the discovery, tells Eyewitness News.'It's the first complete skeleton adult, it is the first skeleton that has a complete arm and a complete leg in one individual that can be compared, and it is the oldest in Southern Africa.'

The remains have been cleaned and reconstructed to reveal a skeleton that has more than 90 percent of its bones intact, save parts of its feet, pelvis, and kneecaps.

On December 6, an Australopithecus fossil dubbed 'Little Foot' was displayed at the Hominin Vault at the University of the Witwatersrand's Evolutionary Studies Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa. Learn how your family history is connected to the human journey with National Geographic’s Geno 2.0 DNA ancestry kit.įor the first time, a near-complete skeleton dating back 3.67 million years has been unveiled to the public.

First photox bacteria evolved 3.6 bya