The Taung child proved humans evolved in Africa, and experts ignored it
In November 1924 the anatomist Raymond Dart opened two boxes of fossils from a South African lime quarry and found the face and natural brain cast of a young skull. Small-brained yet upright-walking, it looked like a link between apes and humans. For more than two decades most experts refused to accept it.
The skull, now known as the Taung child and dated to about 2.8 million years ago, came to Dart via a student, Josephine Salmons, who told him a quarry was turning up fossil monkeys. The position of the hole where the spinal cord meets the skull showed the creature walked on two legs. By January 1925 Dart had named it Australopithecus africanus, the first early hominin ever found, and the first evidence for Charles Darwin's 1871 suggestion that humans arose in Africa.
The timing was bad. The prevailing view held that big brains came before upright walking, and the Piltdown Man hoax from Britain, together with Peking Man in China, seemed to point to origins outside Africa. Critics such as Sir Arthur Keith lumped the Taung child with gorillas or chimpanzees and blamed its human features on youth. Dart hurt his case by reading piles of broken animal bones in the caves as the weapons of bloodthirsty ape-man hunters; hyenas are now known to have gathered them. Robert Broom stood with Dart, found an adult skull at Sterkfontein in 1936, and helped win scientific opinion round by the mid-1940s. That acceptance led to Piltdown being re-examined in 1953 and exposed as a fake.
The species roamed South Africa from roughly 3.3 million until 2.1 million years ago. Its brain held roughly 420 to 510 cubic centimetres; males may have averaged 140 centimetres and 40 kilograms. It walked well on two legs but kept apelike shoulders and arms, perhaps for climbing. Chemical traces show it ate grasses, seeds or underground plant parts, unusual for a primate. Females seem to have been the ones who left their birth groups.
Life was dangerous: most remains ended up in caves as the prey of big cats, and the Taung child itself seems to have been killed by a bird of prey. How the species relates to Homo and Paranthropus is still unresolved.
Source: Australopithecus africanus
