article_snippet.sent: technique shows that Little Foot, an important fossil of an . early human forerunner unearthed in the 1990s in South AfricaSouth Africa, . is roughly 3.7 million years old. '
article_snippet.sent: The age of Little Foot has been highly debated,' said .
article_snippet.sent: , whose . research appears in the journal Nature found Little Foot, a member of the species .
article_snippet.sent: Like Lucy, Little Foot was female.
article_snippet.sent: nearly complete Little Foot fossil skeleton from the .
article_snippet.sent: Foot, although Lucy lived about 500,000 years later.
article_snippet.sent: Like Lucy, Little Foot was female.
article_snippet.sent: The face of Little Foot, which has now been accurately dated for the first time.
article_snippet.sent: Ron Clarke, a professor in the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits University in South Africa holds the Little Foot skull, among the oldest hominid skeletons ever dated at 3.67 million years old, according to an advanced dating method.  
article_snippet.sent: The date places Little Foot as an older relative of Lucy, a famous Australopithecus skeleton dated at 3.2 million years old that was found in Ethiopia.
article_snippet.sent: The new findings suggest Little Foot roamed Earth at around the same time as the famed 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis - shown in a reconstruction above.
article_snippet.sent: When discovered in Hadar, Ethiopia, Lucy was the only skeleton of the species known; Lucy would've stood 3.5 feet (about a meter) tall.
article_snippet.sent: INRAP's French researcher Laurent Bruxelles shows Little Foot, a fossil with both ape-like and human features found in a cave at the Sterkfontein site, near Johannesburg.
highlights_snippet.sent: Little Foot was unearthed in the 1990s in South Africa .
  