Das Fossil des Little-Foot-Homininen könnte eine neue Spezies menschlicher Vorfahren sein. Australische Forscher glauben, dass es sich bei dem in Südafrika gefundenen Skelett nicht um dieselbe Art handelt wie bei zwei im selben südafrikanischen Höhlensystem gefundenen Skeletten

Little Foot, one of the world’s most complete hominin fossils, may be a new species of human ancestor, according to research that raises questions about our evolutionary past.

Publicly unveiled in 2017, Little Foot is the most complete Australopithecus skeleton ever found. The foot bones that lend the fossil its name were first discovered in South Africa 1994, leading to a painstaking excavation over 20 years in the Sterkfontein cave system.

Prof Ronald Clarke, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, who led the team that excavated the skeleton, attributed Little Foot to the species Australopithecus prometheus. Others believed it was Australopithecus africanus, a species first described in 1925 and which had previously been found in the same cave system.

Australopithecus – meaning “southern ape”– was a group of hominins that existed in Africa as early as 4.2m years ago.

But a new study led by Australian [researchers](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.70177), published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, has found that Little Foot’s traits differ from both species, raising a third possibility.

“We think it is a formerly unknown, unsampled species of human ancestor,” said Dr Jesse Martin, an adjunct at La Trobe University in Melbourne, who led the research.

“It doesn’t look like Australopithecus prometheus … but it also doesn’t look like all of the africanus to come out of Sterkfontein.”