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New research study led by researchers from the University of Cambridge and Latrobe University challenges the category of the Little Foot fossil as Australopithecus prometheus
The Little Foot fossil in the Sterkfontein cavern, main South Africa. Image credit: Purdue University.
The Little Foot fossil was found in 1994 in a cavern at Sterkfontein in main South Africa.
Understood as StW 573, the specimen was called for 4 little foot bones discovered in a box of animal fossils that led to the skeleton’s discovery.
In the 2010s, paleoanthropologist Ronald Clarke associated Little Foot to a types of hominin called Australopithecus prometheus
Others kept it was Australopithecus africanusa hominin types very first explained by Australian anatomist Raymond Dart in 1925 and which was currently understood from the very same website and South Africa more broadly.
In the brand-new research study, La Trobe University scientist Dr. Jesse Martin and coworkers discovered that Little Foot does not share a distinct suite of qualities with either types, raising the possibility that it might represent a brand-new types entirely.
“This fossil stays among the most essential discoveries in the hominin record and its real identity is essential to comprehending our evolutionary past,”Dr. Martin stated.
“We believe it’s demonstrably not the case that it’s Australopithecus prometheus or Australopithecus africanusThis is most likely a formerly unknown, human relative.”
“Dr. Clarke is worthy of credit for the discovery of Little Foot, and being among the only individuals to preserve there were 2 types of hominin at Sterkfontein.”
“Little Foot shows in all possibility he’s ideal about that. There are 2 types.”
Forensic facial restoration of another Australopithecus types– A. afarensisImage credit: Cicero Moraes/ CC BY-SA 3.0.
The authors now prepare to clarify which types Little Foot represents and where that types beings in the human ancestral tree.
“Little Foot was among the most total and essential fossils ever found in regards to what it might inform us about early human variety and how our forefathers adjusted to the various environments of southern Africa,” stated Professor Andy Herries, a scientist at Latrobe University and the University of Johannesburg.
“It is plainly various from the type specimen of Australopithecus prometheuswhich was a name specified on the concept these early people made fire, which we now understand they didn’t.”
“Its significance and distinction to other modern fossils plainly reveal the requirement for specifying it as its own distinct types.”
The research study is explained in a paper released in the December 2025 problem of the American Journal of Biological Anthropology
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Jesse M. Martin et al2025. The StW 573 Little Foot Fossil Should Not Be Attributed to Australopithecus prometheus American Journal of Biological Anthropology 188 (4 ): e70177; doi: 10.1002/ ajpa.70177
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