Bonelore
Menu
Famous fossilSterkfontein Caves, South Africa

StW 573 (Little Foot)

Little Foot is an almost complete skeleton of an Australopithecus, found in the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa. Its foot bones were noticed in a box of fossils in 1994, and the rest was freed from the rock over many years.

Specimen label

StW 573
Found
1994 to 1998, by Ron Clarke and colleagues
Age
about 2.2 to 3.7 million years (dating disputed)
A cast of the skull of Little Foot, a heavy brown skull with a prominent brow and a flat face
Photo: Wits University. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
In lifeReconstruction of Little Foot, an older Australopithecus covered in grizzled greyish-brown hair, standing upright on dolomite rock at the mouth of a cave, one hand on the rock
Little Foot in life, at the mouth of a cave in the Sterkfontein valley. Shown as an older adult; the team that described the skeleton thinks it was probably female. Its arms and legs were about the same length. Reconstruction by Bonelore.

The skeleton in brief

Little Foot, catalogued StW 573, is an Australopithecus skeleton from the Sterkfontein Caves. About 90 percent of the skeleton was recovered, which makes it the most complete skeleton of an early human relative of its age. It was probably a female. Her height is usually given as about 1.2 to 1.3 metres, but I could not check that figure against a primary paper.

The find

In 1994 the anatomist Ron Clarke found four foot bones from a small ape-like creature among boxes of fossils in the Sterkfontein collection, which had been labelled as monkey bones. He asked two assistants to look for where they came from. In 1997 they found the matching bones in the cave wall, in just two days, and more of the skeleton in the years that followed, including a tibia, an arm bone and the skull. Removing the skeleton from the hard rock, cleaning and studying it took many years.

The argument about its age and species

The age is controversial. A 2015 study using radioactive elements in the cave sediments gave 3.67 million years, which would make it older than Lucy. Other methods give much younger dates, as low as 2.2 million years. Clarke thinks it is a different species from the better-known Australopithecus africanus and calls it Australopithecus prometheus. A 2025 study by Jesse Martin and colleagues argued that it does not fit any known species of Australopithecus. Francis Thackeray has proposed the name Australopithecus lenyanlenus, which is a proposal and not yet an accepted name. This page links to africanus for the older comparison, without settling the question.

Where it is

Little Foot is held by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. A cast was made for display.

Sources

  • Clarke, R. J. and Kuman, K. (2019). The skull of StW 573, a 3.67 Ma Australopithecus prometheus skeleton from Sterkfontein Caves, South Africa. Journal of Human Evolution 134: 102634.
  • Granger, D. E. and others (2015). New cosmogenic burial ages for Sterkfontein Member 2 Australopithecus and Member 5 Oldowan. Nature 522: 85 to 88.

Back to all famous fossils