For nearly a century, scientists have been puzzling over fossils from a strange and robust-looking distant relative of early ...

For a decade the mammoth limestone caves of the Makapansgat Valley in South Africa (TIME, June 20, 1955) have been yielding the bones and implements of a remarkably human creature known to ...

Farther north, in Pretoria, the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History hosts the skull of Mrs Ples, a representative of Australopithecus africanus, cousin to prometheus, and one of the most ...

The theory that man originated in Africa got a boost when a nearly complete lower jaw of Australopithecus prometheus was found at Makapansgat in the Transvaal this month. Anthropologists now have ...

The researchers gained insight not only into the biology of Little Foot’s species but also into the hardships that this individual, an adult female, encountered during her life.

Granger and team found Little Foot - a member of the species Australopithecus Prometheus - lived at roughly the same time as Australopithecus afarensis, the species whose most famous fossil, known ...

Atlas vertebrae rarely survive in the fossil record, but the skeleton of “Little Foot,” a 3.67-million-year-old human ancestor belonging to the species Australopithecus prometheus, which was ...

A new dating technique has revised the estimated age of Little Foot from 2.2 million to 3.6 million years ago. That’s significant because it places the rare Australopithecus fossil within the ...

Skull, Australopithecus prometheus, South Africa (Courtesy the University of the Witwatersrand). A new dating technique is making it easier for paleoanthropologists to study the human evolutionary ...

A new date for StW 573, the Little Foot skeleton of Australopithecus prometheus, of 3.67 ± 0.16 million years (My); A cosmogenic burial date for the Sterkfontein Oldowan of 2.18 ± 0.21 My.