Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Although Kadanuumuu's pelvis, arm, and upward-turned shoulder
socket are typical for his species, the limb bones are too fragmentary to
say much about his body proportions.
28
Another stunning australopithecine skeleton was discovered deep
within a cave at Sterkfontein, South Africa, by the paleoanthropologist
Ron Clarke, who is still extricating the specimen from its rocky encase-
ment (figure 28). Clarke, who has an extraordinary gift for reading
bones, which is facilitated by a photographic memory, initially discov-
ered four bones of the left foot in material that had been brought into his
laboratory. This caused him to organize a search for other parts of the
individual in the enormous dark cave that produced the foot bones. In
a needle-in-the-haystack story that rivals Eugène Dubois's discovery of
Pithecanthropus erectus
(discussed in chapter 9), other bits of the skeleton
were discovered protruding from the rocky floor in which the speci-
(StW 573), nicknamed Little Foot, when I traveled to the archives at the
University of Witwatersrand in 2008 to study Raymond Dart's papers,
and can attest that a very deep, dark (headlamps recommended), and
steep descent is involved in reaching the skeleton, which is 82 feet below
the surface.
Little Foot lived about 3.3 million years ago, at approximately the
same time as the Dikika baby and Lucy. Enough of the skeleton has
come to light to add to our knowledge about the body builds of aus-
four feet tall. Unlike apes or humans, it had arms and legs that were
approximately equal in length. Remarkably, the foot shows a mixed
pattern of a humanlike heel with an apelike divergent big toe that was
strongly mobile. Partly for these reasons, Clarke thinks that StW 573 did
not belong to either
Australopithecus afarensis
or
A. africanus
but to another
Little Foot's anatomy combined features of an ape's arboreal foot
and a human's bipedal foot, which suggests to Clarke that “change from
