One of the quondam and most pure hominin fossil has just beenrevealed in South Africa . After two decennary of being excavated , cleaned , and pieced together , the skeleton will now be studied to see what can be teach from this early human ancestor .
Known as " Little Foot " , the skeleton is thought to date to around3.67 million years ago , so it ’s roughly half a million year older than that of the famed fogy of Lucy discovered in Ethiopia , although it is significant to note that this geological dating is argufy . small Foot belong to to the same genus as Lucy , Australopithecus , but probably make up a different species of the early hominins .
The name derives from the instant that Professor Ron Clarke first came across the incredible breakthrough in 1994 . Coming from a serial of cave around 40 kilometer ( 25 mi ) Frederick North - due west of Johannesburg , Clarke found four small understructure bone , before coming across the fragments of a downcast leg osseous tissue that had been take out by mineworker a few years earlier .
On the basis of this , the researchers went back to the master copy in 1997 and amazingly found that there were still bone fragments sticking out of the ground . Because of the rock in which the bones had been preserved , it took until 2012 for all the systema skeletale to be excavated . “ My assistants and I have work on painstakingly cleaning the bone from breccia blocks and rebuild the full skeleton until the present day,”saidClarke .
The fact that breccia is as strong as cement is the rationality it has take away the team this long to finally take out and clean every bone , but it is also the precise reason why the skeleton has been maintain in such exquisite contingent in the first place .
The current thinking is that a unseasoned femaleAustralopithecuswas once walking across the landscape , before falling down a light beam into the caves where she then died , only to be fag up again some 3.6 million years later .
Little Foot is the first almost - gross human ancestor fogy to have been excavated where it was fossilized , say the researchers , as well as the most gross hominin older than 1.5 million years . It is hoped that this will permit scientist an unprecedented view of the early evolution of the lineage that eventually devote rise to us .
