archeologia: Little Foot

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

"Little Foot" (Stw 573) is the nickname given to a nearly complete Australopithecus fossil skeleton found in 1994 in the cave system of Sterkfontein, South Africa. The skeleton was originally nicknamed "Little Foot" in 1995 when four ankle bones in a museum collection were sufficient to ascertain that the individual had been able to walk upright. The remainder of the skeleton was subsequently located in the cave from which the ankle bones had been collected. Because the bones were completely embedded in concrete-like rock, their extremely difficult and tedious extraction took around 15 years. The bones proved to be the most complete skeleton of the early hominin lineage leading to humans, w…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 90

Australopithecines: Separate Kind, Not Transitional Form. The australopithecines are routinely presented as the anatomical bridge between apes and humans, the fossil group that turns common ancestry from an inference into a demonstration. This paper argues the opposite: that in every system where the ape-to-human transition would have to show itself, the australopithecines instead mark a boundary. The hyoid of A. afarensis is ape-like, built to support laryngeal air sacs rather than articulate speech, and no transitional form bridges it to the human bar-shaped hyoid. The pelvis, though capable of upright walking, retains a long, posteriorly oriented ischium, strongly flared ilia, and a shor…

Evidence: 30 • authority: 72

Australopithecus africanus is an extinct species of australopithecine which lived between about 3.3 and 2.1 million years ago in the Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene of South Africa. The species has been recovered from Taung, Sterkfontein, Makapansgat, and Gladysvale. The first specimen, the Taung Child, was described by anatomist Raymond Dart in 1924, and was the first early hominin found. However, its closer relations to humans than to other apes would not become widely accepted until the middle of the century because most had believed humans evolved outside of Africa. It is unclear how A. africanus relates to other hominins, being variously placed as ancestral to Homo and Paranthropus,…

Evidence: 22 • authority: 80

Fig. 10. Short tubular bones of the human foot skeleton submitted for study.