Little Foot is a bridge between the world of apes and the world of humans, a 90% complete record of a life lived nearly four million years ago that represents the most complete early human ancestor skeleton ever found.
The Most Complete Early Human Skeleton Circa







Little Foot represents a pivotal moment in the study of the human lineage and hominin evolution. Unlike many fossil finds that consist only of teeth or jaw fragments, this discovery began with four small foot bones identified by Ronald Clarke in 1994. These fossils, which had been stored in a museum box since 1980, eventually led researchers back to the Sterkfontein cave system to find a nearly complete three-million-year-old skeleton.
Ronald Clarke is a paleoanthropologist who famously identified the first fragments of Little Foot while searching through storage boxes at a South African medical school. In 1994, he recognized that bones labeled as monkey fragments were actually hominin fossils, specifically the talus, navicular, medial cuneiform, and first metatarsal. His discovery sparked a massive effort to recover the rest of the skeleton from the deep chambers of the Sterkfontein cave.
The Little Foot skeleton was discovered within the Sterkfontein cave system in South Africa. While the initial foot bones were found in a neglected storage room among fossils collected years earlier, Ronald Clarke correctly suspected that the remainder of the individual was still embedded in the stone deep inside the cave. This site has since become central to our understanding of early members of the human lineage.
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