"Lucy," meet "Little Foot."
Scientists said on Wednesday a sophisticated new dating technique shows that Little Foot, an important fossil of an early human forerunner unearthed in the 1990s in South Africa, is roughly 3.7 million years old.
"The age of Little Foot has been highly debated," said geologist Darryl Granger of Purdue University in Indiana, whose research appears in the journal Nature.
The researchers analyzed 11 rock samples from around the nearly complete Little Foot fossil skeleton from the Sterkfontein Caves to gauge its age.
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Our species, Homo sapiens, appeared roughly 200,000 years ago. Earlier members of the human genus, Homo, date back more than 2 million years. Our genus was predated by other species on the human family tree including various representatives of the genus Australopithecus.
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Like Lucy, Little Foot was female. The species was much bigger and taller than Lucy's, with gorilla-like facial features but fully upright and very strong with powerful hands for climbing, according to paleoanthropologists Ron Clarke and Kathy Kuman of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
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Clarke and Kuman noted similarities in facial structure and some teeth between Little Foot and the later human relative Paranthropus, indicating Little Foot's species may have been ancestral to Paranthropus or a close cousin.
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"The fact, therefore, that we have at least two (Australopithecus) species living at the same time in different parts of Africa, (about) 3.67 million years ago, raises the question of how many other species there may have been which have not yet been discovered," Clarke and Kuman said by email.
© Thomson Reuters 2015
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