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Was it a fight to the death? Little Foot, an ancient hominin who lived in what is now South Africa 3.67 million years ago, may have died in a battle for food with a large male baboon-like monkey after falling down a hole.
Little Foot is an extraordinary find. As New Scientist revealed earlier this month, she may belong to a distinct species of hominin – Australopithecus prometheus – that was named in 1948 on the basis of other fossils. Judging by Little Foot’s features, including her flat face, A. prometheus could have been an ancestor to a group of heavily built hominins called Paranthropus which lived alongside early members of our human genus.
Her skeleton was found in Sterkfontein Cave to the northwest of Johannesburg. It is more than 90 per cent complete, and excavating her fragile bones took 14 years.
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But as the excavators worked away in the cave, they realised that Little Foot wasn’t alone. Beneath her pelvis, Ronald Clarke at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and colleagues found a skull belonging to an extinct baboon-like monkey species called Parapapio broomi.
Then, beneath Little Foot’s right arm they found a Parapapio shinbone. And intermingled with the bones in Little Foot’s spine were two Parapapio vertebrae. Finally, next to Little Foot’s left thigh bone was a Parapapio arm bone.
It’s likely that all of the bones belonged to the same individual: a male that was at least as large, if not larger, than a modern male baboon. Clarke’s team say that raises an interesting idea — that the two fought before falling their death.
Fight to the death
The cave in which Little Foot and the ancient baboon-like monkey were found must have been hard to access 3.67 million years ago, because Little Foot’s skeleton shows no sign of being disturbed by scavengers. The cave probably opened out to the surface through a steep shaft, and was difficult to get in or out of.
We know that fig and other fruit trees grow around the entrances to such caves today, and they must have done in prehistory too. This would have made the area attractive for fruit-eating primates including hominins.
So it’s possible that Little Foot had a violent face-off with the male monkey above the cave entrance. “She may have been looking for food in the trees and got into a confrontation with the large Parapapio,” says Clarke.
Both individuals could have lost their footing during the fight and fallen down the cave shaft, dying in the fall. This would explain why the bones of the two became intermingled – suggesting they fell into the cave at the same time – before they became buried and fossilised.
There’s no shortage of alternative death scenarios, though, says Clarke. It’s possible Little Foot was instead killed by a hyena, a sabre-toothed cat, or a leopard. “There was a leopard lower jaw with the skeleton,” he says. She may even have died after receiving a bite from a poisonous snake. “There are many in the Sterkfontein vicinity even today,” says Clarke.
This wouldn’t be the first time that researchers have argued that a famous ancient hominin met a violent end. In 2016 a different research team argued that Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old hominin, died in a fall from a tree.
In the mid-1990s, Clarke and Lee Berger, also at the University of the Witwatersrand, argued that the very first australopith fossil ever found – a skull known as the Taung Child that was discovered in South Africa in 1924 – belonged to a young individual who was killed by an eagle.
“Dramatic and violent death from African predators must have been a constant risk,” says Clarke. “There was a much greater variety of large carnivores present in the landscape than we have today.”
Journal reference: Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2018.11.010
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