Little Foot & You: On Death and Evolution (2024)

Several years ago, I visited the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa, a sprawl of limestone caves and excavation sites that holds inside it the world’s highest concentration of ancient hominid bones. One of the most famous findings from the region is the remains of a female member of the Australopithecus genus, Little Foot. Species of the Australopithecus genus roamed the Earth approximately 2 to 4 million years ago, and Little Foot is famous for being the most complete skeleton of her genus.

We were guided through one of the caves, cool and wet, the roof pocked with holes leading to the surface. Our guide stopped and pointed out the hole that Little Foot had fatefully fallen into and died, where her bones had been excellently preserved thanks to the unique mix of limestone and other minerals that the Cradle of Humankind is known for. I entertained the thought that we should surgically engrave our birthplace and birthdate into our bones in case any of us met the same fate. We could make the jobs of future archeologists very simple – forgoing carbon dating for oracle bone reading. Anyway, my point is that Little Foot fell into a hole and died, but she had no idea she would become a world-renowned discovery after lying dead for several million years. She had no idea she would be one of the most famous members of the Australopithecus genus, looked upon by Homo sapiens for generations. And having not a clue about any of that, she probably fell and thought to herself the pre-historic equivalent of “fuck, I’m dying in this hole now”, and then her flesh decomposed and her bones were cast into the African earth.

For the rest of the tour, I thought about what it must’ve been like to be Little Foot in her final moments. If she could’ve conceptualized her lasting impact on humanity, would she have felt at ease as she lay there dying? It’s a universal human experience to wonder what it might be like to die, and as a species we’ve built a large repertoire of possibilities on the moment of death and the mystery of what follows. In a way, we do not have to look further than our own experience to know the answers to our questions. In a way, we are what it was like for Little Foot to die, and in general all of us are what it is like to die, simultaneously just a few steps before and a few steps after the big show. To spring into consciousness at all is to spring into the process of dying – to join a long, long chain of events that started at the very beginning of time.

Nine years ago, my friend passed away. After his passing, I felt a closeness with the afterlife – he visited me in my dreams and I swear I could feel the fabric of his clothes. In one dream in particular, I was incredulous that we were together again. I insisted he was dead. He insisted he had never really died and that he was doing just fine. We sat next to each other on my couch and laughed ourselves to tears about the whole predicament.

From my journal on the day he died, I’d written:

My hope is that some of whatever is left of you on Earth finds its way into my pores so I can experience life on this planet for you.

Amidst the pain I found relief in the idea that life continued, that although he was gone, our collective experience of existence was shared because he had been a part of it. To be conscious at all is to exist in the Universe in its entirety.

Little Foot existed, as far as we know, before the Homo genus came about. It’s easy to look at her near-complete skeleton and see our humanity reflected back at us. But long before Little Foot, hundreds of millions of years ago, the first mammals – small, shrew-like creatures – ran with the dinosaurs. We are the result of those little rodents scurrying between the toes of behemoth lizards and megafauna. Rewind a few more hundred million years, and we trace the footsteps of our lineage back onto sandy beaches, splashing into the alien world of the ocean, where our ancestors existed as the very first tetrapods – or fish with something akin to legs and feet. For a time longer than any of us can appreciably fathom, life as we knew it existed only underwater. Our ancestors were more akin to coral than mammals – colorful and frondy, lining a quiet ocean floor devoid of further complex life. At this point, we’ve stepped back approximately 580 million years away from where we are today, and in that case approximately 577 million years away from Little Foot falling into a hole. As we go further back in time, the organisms become less and less complex, devolving from multicellular to single-celled organisms. Now, we’ve made the jump to 3.5 billion years ago, in the middle of Earth’s childhood.

What is it like to be an ancient tetrapod walking the sandy Earth for the first time? What is it like to be a eukaryote living in the steam of a volcanic opening in the Earth’s crust? What is it like to be an Australopithecus roaming the African wilderness? What is it like to be the Earth forming, hot and molten and strange, 4.5 billion years ago?

Perhaps the easiest way to answer these questions is to answer this one instead: what is it like to be you?

For life to exist in any form, the Earth needed to be rich in heavy elements. In the very, very beginning, approximately 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang created hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Elements which are a prerequisite for life – such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and iron – began to form some hundreds of millions of years later, in the hearts of stars, thrust into the Galaxy only upon the dramatic explosion of the star’s death. Even heavier elements, such as gold and lead, formed after cataclysmic meetings of two neutron stars – stars so heavy and dense that a human would weigh billions of pounds on one’s surface.

In other words, stars collide, explode, and die to create us. What does it feel like to be a star colliding with another star? What does it feel like for a star to die? What does it feel like for a Universe to be born? As Carl Sagan famously said in his TV series Cosmos, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

Your conscious experience is what it feels like for a star to die, for a rocky planet to form, for life to rise into existence, to be a fish with silly legs and a shrew amongst lizards, for Little Foot to die.

After my friend passed away, my relationship to death transformed from entirely abstract to, at times, deep, physical pain. I can still feel the pain at times, and along with it I developed a fear that death would suddenly take anyone and everyone that I loved. This relationship to death is certainly not unique. Over the past couple years, my relationship with death has slowly begun to shift. As a way to face my fear, I began to learn more about it. I read about death doula work, about hospice work, about what it might feel like to die. I attended a Death Cafe and met other death-curious people. I read Laura Huxley’s account of Aldous Huxley dying, and then I read Island by Aldous Huxley, a novel which describes a utopian, death-positive society. Some nights as I’m falling asleep, I think of myself slowly decaying. I do not dwell on these ideas to grovel in my fear – I reflect on them to appreciate the chance to exist. In moments of clarity, I see death as the final moment of birth. The act of leaving is just as tremendous as the act of entering. This is one of the many lessons we can learn from the stars, who are naturals at putting on a beautiful cosmic display during their own deaths. Learning alone cannot absolve us of fear of death; it has to come from somewhere deeper than that. But I’ve taken a step closer to seeing death as life – as just another act of birth, precluding the next step in the Universe’s evolution.

Just last week, I went to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and stood face-to-face with an artist’s reconstruction of different Homo species. We’re the only remaining species in our genus. Looking into their faces, much like our own, it is easy to imagine their joy, sorrow, contemplations, and curiosity. I walked through the mammals exhibit and found a bronze statue of Morganucadon oehleri, one of the oldest known mammals – one of the first creatures to define our present-day biological class, Mammalia. I left the museum and the sun was shining. The sun, our very own star, patiently fusing hydrogen atoms together into helium for billions of years, until the time comes for our sun to die as we know it, to become something entirely different. Our sun is what’s known as a Main Sequence star. As it completes its conversion from a hydrogen-dominated core to a helium-dominated one, it begins to expand slowly, on the order of a billion years, entering the end of its life as a Red Giant star. From there, our sun will slowly unfurl, shedding layer after layer of itself into space, until what is left is a brilliant fossil, a glowing nebula where our Solar System once stood. Of course, we will be long gone by then. Whatever life is on Earth billions of years from now will die as our sun expands, and all records of our existence will likely be destroyed. But the Universe keeps the score, and the substances which coalesced and formed our lives will launch themselves back into the Galaxy, to start it all over again.