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Little Foot, 3.67 mya, died in a conflict with a baboon-like monkey?

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That’s the story suggested at New Scientist, re the death of the 3.67 mya hominin.

We know that fig and other fruit trees grow around the entrances to such caves today, and they must have done in prehistory too. This would have made the area attractive for fruit-eating primates including hominins. So it’s possible that Little Foot had a violent face-off with the male monkey above the cave entrance. “She may have been looking for food in the trees and got into a confrontation with the large Parapapio,” says Clarke. Both individuals could have lost their footing during the fight and fallen down the cave shaft, dying in the fall.Colin Barras, “Hominin v monkey deathmatch ended in a draw when they fell down a hole” at New Scientist

Option the movie rights.

Seriously, it’s amazing how detailed finds can be these days, whether or not the story offered at New Scientist is the correct account of what happened.

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See also: So what’s this about “Little Foot”? Ninety percent of the skeleton found in South Africa is complete, compared to (possibly) fellow Australopithecus Lucy’s 40%. The papers will be published in a special edition of the Journal of Human Evolution. An early announcement described Little Foot as an Australopithecus prometheus, but as Barras notes above, that’s disputed. And we don’t know much more than that.

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