Valentine Pontifex

Little Foot is likely to be the best australopithicine fossil ever.

The exploration of this find now has found parts of the pelvis, ribs, backbone, and upper leg. See this BBC story. Previously a very near complete and articulated skull, parts of the foot, parts of the lower leg, and near complete arm and hand had been found.

Secular Pinoy

Better than Lucy? In terms of the amount of bones found, or in terms of the ramifications on anthropology?

Valentine Pontifex

In terms of amount of bones, it might be. Ron Clarke has expressed the hope of finding virtually the entire skeleton. I don't know if he still has that hope, but it was certainly not an unreasonable hope. In terms of quality of bones, it is absolutely better than Lucy. Lucy had very little skull material, while Little Foot has an very nearly complete and articulated skull. The arm and hand were articulated as well. Little Foot has good representation of the hand and the foot unlike Lucy. I don't think there can be any doubt that this is better evidence for how the organism was put together than Lucy is.

Of course, it will not have the historical significance that Lucy did. We know a whole lot more about australopithicines now then when Lucy was found.

Oolon Colluphid

From the BBC link:

“In my view, knuckle-walking and vertical climbing - up and down tree trunks - are a specialisation of chimps and gorillas after humans split off from them."

I’m not sure where he gets this from. Sure, chimps and gorillas are more specialised in doing these, but so what? Looking wider, both orangs and gibbons knuckle-walk when on the ground too, they’re just on the ground less, and they certainly climb up and down tree trunks too (though gibbons tend to hook on and swing, I’ve seen ’em climb too). And a roughly upright body posture is the result of being a large primate that hangs below branches rather than walk along them, hence the lack of tails, which would just get in the way.

I realise that this guy knows more about it than I do, but I don’t see how knuckle-walking when on the ground wasn’t the ancestral condition -- gorilla and chimp refinements notwithstanding. Put it this way: if you have to go on all fours, do you put your palms flat? Thought not.

Cheers, DT

Ergaster

One thing I should point out is that the report on the BBC website is *so* garbled it is almost nonsensical. I'm not sure what the problem was, but I suspect it lay with the reporter and not Clarke.

The locomotion-of-the-ancestor is a valid and ongoing debate in the discipline. Basically, there are those who feel that a specialized form of locomotion cannot arise from a specialized form of locomotion, and there are those who say "Why the heck not?" (and btw: orangs do not knuckle-walk, they "fist-walk". There is a distinction due to morphology, and gibbons and siamangs do neither. They travel as bipeds with their very long arms raised above their heads, looking for all the world like ballet dancers who have forgotten their steps. They do not like being on the ground).

The *real* issue is how one accounts for the fact that there are derived traits related to k-walking, especially of the distal radius and wrist and hand, shared by both African great apes and early australos (there are fewer, but some, shared with said apes and modern humans). One can account for these traits functionally if one does postulate an ancestor of the African ape+hominin clade that knuckle-walked (with the subsequent loss of k-walking in hominins), but it is harder (and maybe less parsimonious) to account for them if that LCA did not k-walk. Then the behaviour and the traits were aquired independently by both chimps and gorillas, and traits that closely resemble those in the African apes were independently acquired by hominins for obscure reasons.

The real excitement is that the Sterkfontein australo is apparently almost entirely complete, which is unheard of in human paleontology. Not only will it reveal unambiguous associations of postcranium with the craniodental remains, but it is bound to show us bits of anatomy which have never been seen before, or only exist in extremely fragmentary states. The amount of info will be staggering, and the controversies it will generate wrt phylogeny, taxonomy, and behaviour will likewise keep everyone busy for decades.

Valentine Pontifex

Agreed, the article does have a lot of problems! I was hopeing the SAJoS article was online, but I did not see it on its web site.

Absolutely. We have been waiting since 1998 to find out if it really was so complete as Dr. Clarke thought it was. It appears that it is or is close to being so. Extremely complete (skull with all the teeth; some foot bones, leg, arm, hand, ribs, pelvis, backbone) and what is more it is articulated: no need for any three-D jigsaw puzzle work.