Many of her bones are fractured and slightly displaced. She would have originally fallen at least 10 m (about 30 ft) into the cave. Perhaps she was fleeing from a beast of prey and didn’t see where she was going, or was running in pursuit of, or away from, a rival australopithecine. Little Foot probably fell into a deep shaft that was covered with undergrowth. This was important as she probably slept in the safety of trees at night, to escape the prowling predators, like sabre-toothed cats and hunting hyenas that roamed her world. She walked upright but, thanks to her powerful hands and a slightly divergent big toe, was better at climbing than we are. An early form of Australopithecus, she was smaller than most modern humans, and had a smaller brain. Little Foot lived in the Cradle of Humankind sometime between 3.67-million years ago. Who was Little Foot and how did she get into the cave? It took 15 years of painstaking work to excavate the remains, which have been carefully cleaned and reconstructed. He added: “Alun Hughes had a recurrent dream of breaking through into a cavern and finding a complete skeleton. The impact of what it meant was like a dream.I said to him ‘am I dreaming?’” No-one was more surprised than me when Stephen said, ‘We think we’ve found the bone!’ He seemed low-key, though. I didn’t know that we’d find it, but I knew the skeleton must be there and we must look for it. “When I found the second tibia, that’s when I knew. It was embedded in breccia, deep inside the Silberberg Grotto.Ĭlarke said he realised there was an australopithecine skeleton lying somewhere in the Sterkfontein Caves when he found the broken bone from the second leg, which lime miners had blasted from the breccia a century before.ĭescribing the extraordinary discovery, Clarke said: Searching with only hand-held lamps, the two men astonishingly found the matching bone after just two days. He gave his technical assistants, Stephen Motsumi and Nkwane Molefe, a cast of the broken tibia, or shin bone, and asked them to search for the piece from which it had been snapped in the vast and dark Silberberg Grotto – a task akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Clarke guessed that because there were bones from two feet, the rest of the skeleton could still be in the caves. The bones had originally been blasted out by lime miners, and the broken bone from the second leg was among them. Then, in 1997, Clarke discovered more bones in a box of monkey fossils, which he realised also belonged to Stw 573. The bones had actually been found in 1980, but had not been recognised. The following year, he and esteemed palaeoanthropologist Professor Phillip Tobias, also of the University of the Witwatersrand, announced the discovery of the fossil Stw 573, nicknamed “Little Foot”, consisting of four articulating foot bones. In 1994, palaeoanthropologist Professor Ron Clarke was in the workroom at Sterkfontein, sorting through a box of animal bones from the Silberberg Grotto in the caves, when he came across four foot bones which he realised belonged to an Australopithecus. The story of how Little Foot was found, more than 3-million years after she fell into the cave, is almost as remarkable as the skeleton itself.
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