Little Foot, a South African fossil skeleton as enigmatic as it is spectacular, can now lay claim to being just as old as the far more famous Lucy skeleton from East Africa—at least according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. 

Using a relatively new dating technique that improves dating accuracy for very old samples, the fossil’s discoverer, Ron Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, and his colleagues now pin an age of almost four million years on hardened sediments surrounding the fossil. If the skeleton itself is that old, it could help push South Africa back onto center stage in early human evolution—a position it relinquished in the 1960s to