The fossil skull found by an Australian that rocked the world

April 20, 2025

Here’s how the story of the Taung Child fossil skull is usually told:

In 1924 an Australian anthropologist and anatomist, Raymond Dart, acquired a block of calcified sediment from a limestone quarry in South Africa. He painstakingly removed a fossil skull from this material.

A few months later, on 7 February 1925, he published his description of what he argued was a new hominin species, Australopithecus africanus, in the journal Nature. It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery site and its young age.

The international scientific community rebuffed this hypothesis. They were looking outside Africa for human origins and argued that the skull more likely belonged to a non-human primate. Dart was vindicated decades later after subsequent similar fossil discoveries elsewhere in Africa.

Dart is portrayed as prescient in most retellings. He’s hailed for elevating the importance of Africa in the narrative of human origins.

But is this a biased and simplified narrative? The discovery played out during a period marked by colonialism, racism and racial segregation and apartheid in South Africa. The history of human origins research is, therefore, intertwined with inequality, exclusion and scientifically unsound ideas.

More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/news/the-fossil-skull-that-rocked-the-world/