'Little Foot' fossil sheds light on human forerunners

A sophisticated new dating technique has shown that Little Foot — an important early hominid fossil unearthed in the 1990s in South Africa — is roughly 3.7 million years old.  Previous estimates had been as broad as from 1.5 to four million years.  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 as Lucy, comes from Ethiopia. Both species blended ape-like and human-like traits but with different features.