The team used synchrotron imaging and supercomputers to reconstruct the face of the famous Australopithecus fossil.
The most complete known Australopithecus fossil, dubbed “Little Foot,” now has a face, albeit a virtual one.Little Foot emerged in South Africa in the 1990s, though it took paleoanthropologist Ron Clarke and colleagues nearly two decades to fully excavate the 3.
67-million-year-old fossil. While its skull is almost completely intact—a rarity for fossils of this age—part of the face is shattered, complicating its study. To avoid further damaging the fossil, researchers reconstructed it virtually.“Because the skull is dense and that we aimed to identify all the fractures, we took “Little Foot” on a trip to Europe so that it could get scanned at the synchrotron in the UK ,” Amélie Beaudet, a paleoanthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research , told Interesting Engineering. “The synchrotron technology is, for now, the most efficient technique for scanning at a very high resolution with a good contrast between materials.”Thousands of scans allowed Beaudet, co-author of a study published Monday in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol, and her colleagues to virtually separate the face’s fragments using semi-automated methods and supercomputers before reassembling them into their original configuration. The digital skull, which took more than half a decade to complete, has a resolution of 21 microns.Unexpected similarities with East African fossilsThe team then compared it with other great apes and with other Australopithecus specimens. Australopithecus is an extinct genus of primates that lived between about 4.4 million to 1.4 million years ago. They are close modern human relatives, or perhaps even predecessors. The famous fossil “Lucy” is an Australopithecus.The team found that that Little Foot’s facial size and morphology more closely resemble those of Australopithecus specimens recovered from eastern Africa than those found in southern Africa. Specifically, Little Foot’s orbits —like those of eastern African Australopithecus living around the same time—are relatively large. Beaudet said the function of this feature remains unclear, though the facial region may have been evolutionarily significant.“We have to be careful because the comparative sample is very limited and we are only talking about the face ,” Beaudet cautioned. However, “the fact that ‘Little Foot’ shows similarities with eastern African specimens is interesting because, for now, we do not know how the Australopithecus populations in eastern, central, and southern Africa are related,” she explained. “Because we do not have access to the DNA, the only way to know more about their relationships is to compare their morphologies and identify similarities or differences.”A reconstruction scientists can revisitWhile a digital reconstruction may not sound as dramatic as physically assembling an ancient primate’s skull, Beaudet noted that the approach allows researchers to share the 3D model with other scientists. More importantly, the virtual “puzzle” can be repeated and revised—something impossible once a physical reconstruction has been completed.Eyes may be the windows to the soul, but in their absence, Little Foot’s eye sockets will have to suffice.
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