The ancient human ancestor ‘Little Foot’ gets a new face

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 years later.

Some of the skeleton, including the skull and face, was partially crushed and distorted by the rock. In 2019, researchers scanned the skull using a synchrotron X-ray imaging facility in the United Kingdom to produce highly detailed models of the bones. They then spent years digitally putting Little Foot’s face back together.

“Now we have a very good reconstruction, something we could not do with the physical specimen,” says paleoanthropologist Amélie Beaudet of CNRS in France.

Beaudet and her colleagues compared the facial features of Little Foot with three other Australopithecus skulls and the features of related apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans. Intriguingly, some of Little Foot’s features, such as distinctly wide 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 could help explain why Little Foot looks different from Australopithecus individuals who lived in the same area hundreds of thousands of years later.

But Beaudet cautions that with so few Australopithecus skulls to compare, researchers cannot be sure that this is the reason for Little Foot’s unique looks. “We have only a few specimens, so we need to be really careful.”

The next steps involve modeling Little Foot’s teeth and braincase, which will help scientists learn more about this enigmatic human relative and how it helped shape the evolution of the genus Homo, Beaudet says. “That’s the only way, I think, for us to understand … why we evolved the way we did.”