2.2 Million Years Old

Ape-man Skeleton Is 2.2 Million Years Old

Liverpool scientists worked in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Leeds to analyse the skeleton, which was found in 1997 in Sterkfontein cave in South Africa. Known as 'Little Foot', it was known to be between two million and four million years old, but the team has now dated it precisely to 2.2 million years old.

These new findings reveal that the ape-like creature - part of the Australophithecus africanus family - may not be the immediate ancestor of human beings as some experts originally thought. This is because the team observed that 'Little Foot' lived after the arrival of the stone tool makers, Homo habilis, raising the possibility that this family was more of a side branch of the human evolutionary tree.

Dr Alfred Latham, from the University's School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology said: "'Little Foot' is known to have stood on two feet, standing approximately 130cm tall and having a brain not much larger than a modern chimpanzee. It was discovered cemented in layers of stalagmites and archaeologists are continuing to extract the skeleton from the hardened deposits. We think that 'Little Foot' either fell down a shaft or somehow got trapped in the cave and died there. The remains were preserved in the stalagmite layers and it is these layers that have helped our team to date the skeleton".