Taung Child: Raymond Dart and the First Australopithecus Fossil

The Taung Child is the fossil skull of a young hominin found in a limestone quarry near Taung, South Africa, in 1924 and described by the anatomist Raymond Dart in February 1925. Dart named it Australopithecus africanus, the “southern ape of Africa”, and claimed it was a human relative that walked upright. Rejected by most experts for more than 20 years, it is now recognised as one of the most important fossils in the history of science, the find that first pointed to Africa as the birthplace of humankind.

Background: where did humans come from?

In the early 20th century most scientists expected the earliest human ancestors to be found in Asia or Europe. Charles Darwin had suggested in 1871 that Africa was the most likely cradle, because humans’ closest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, live there. But the best-known early human fossils, such as Java Man and the Neanderthals, came from elsewhere.

Expectations were also shaped by Piltdown Man, a skull and jaw “found” in southern England and announced in 1912. It combined a large, human-like braincase with an ape-like jaw, suggesting that a big brain had evolved first. Piltdown was exposed as a forgery in 1953, but for four decades it misled the field.

Discovery in 1924

Raymond Dart, born in Australia in 1893, had become professor of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1923. In 1924 one of his students, Josephine Salmons, showed him a fossil baboon skull from the Buxton Limeworks near Taung, several hundred kilometres south-west of Johannesburg, where miners were blasting limestone.

Dart arranged for boxes of fossil-bearing rock from the quarry to be sent to him. In late November 1924, by his own account while dressing to act as best man at a wedding at his house, he opened them and found a natural stone cast of a brain (an endocast) that fitted into a block containing a face.

Working with simple tools, reportedly including his wife’s knitting needles, Dart spent weeks separating the face from the hard rock. By about 23 December 1924 the face was free. Separating the upper and lower jaws took until 1929.

What Dart saw

The skull belonged to a child, with milk teeth and its first permanent molars just emerging. Its brain was small, around 400 cubic centimetres, not much bigger than a young ape’s. But several features were human-like. The canine teeth were small, the face did not jut out as much as in apes, and the foramen magnum, the opening where the spinal cord leaves the skull, lay further forward, suggesting that the head was balanced on an upright spine.

On 7 February 1925 Dart published his conclusions in Nature under the title “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa”. He argued that the creature was intermediate between apes and humans and walked on two legs. He wrote the paper in only a few weeks after freeing the fossil.

Two decades of rejection

The reaction from Britain’s leading authorities was largely hostile. Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and Grafton Elliot Smith, Dart’s own former mentor, argued that the skull belonged to a young ape, perhaps related to chimpanzees or gorillas. They pointed out, fairly, that juvenile apes look more human than adults, and that no adult specimen existed.

Other factors weighed against Dart. The fossil did not fit the Piltdown model of a large brain evolving first. Major discoveries of Peking Man in China in the late 1920s also drew attention to Asia. Dart, a young scientist in South Africa, was far from the centres of British science, and he did not travel to London with the original fossil until 1931.

Robert Broom and the turn of the tide

The Scottish-born doctor and palaeontologist Robert Broom was one of the few who supported Dart from the start. In 1936 he found the first adult australopithecine at Sterkfontein, near Johannesburg, followed by more fossils at Kromdraai and Swartkrans. In 1947 Broom and John Robinson found the complete adult skull known as Mrs Ples and a partial skeleton with a pelvis adapted to upright walking.

The British anatomist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark examined the South African fossils in 1946–47 and declared that they were hominins. In 1947 Keith publicly acknowledged in a letter to Nature that Dart had been right. Piltdown’s exposure as a hoax in 1953 removed the last major obstacle.

Later research

Studies of tooth growth published in 1985 by Timothy Bromage and Christopher Dean showed that the Taung Child was about three years old when it died, not six as previously thought, because early hominins matured faster than modern humans.

In 1995 Lee Berger and Ron Clarke suggested that the child had been killed by a large eagle, based on damage to animal bones from the site. In 2006 Berger described marks in the floor of the eye sockets similar to those left by crowned eagles on the skulls of monkeys they kill. The geological age of the fossil is also uncertain: it is commonly put at about 2.8 million years, but the Taung deposits are hard to date and some estimates are younger.

The natural endocast has been studied for a century. Researchers including Ralph Holloway and Dean Falk have long disagreed about whether its brain surface shows ape-like or more human-like organisation.

Myths and facts

Myth: Dart was ignored by everyone. Dart faced strong opposition from the most powerful figures in British anatomy, but he was not entirely alone. Robert Broom visited him soon after the announcement and supported him, and some other scientists accepted that the fossil was at least an unusual ape worth taking seriously.

Myth: the critics had no scientific case. Their objections were partly driven by prejudice about where and how humans evolved, but some were reasonable. A single juvenile skull really was hard to interpret, because young apes have flatter faces and rounder heads than adults. Only adult fossils could settle the matter, and those came later.

Fact: Dart was right about upright walking. Later skeletons of Australopithecus africanus, including pelvis and leg bones from Sterkfontein, confirmed that the species walked on two legs, while still having a small brain.

Fact: the name is still in use. Australopithecus, which Dart coined, became the name of a whole group of species, including Lucy’s Australopithecus afarensis, and africanus remains a valid species a century later.

Timeline

• 1912: Piltdown Man is announced in England.
• 1923: Raymond Dart becomes professor of anatomy in Johannesburg.
• 1924, November: Rock from the Buxton Limeworks containing the Taung fossil reaches Dart.
• 1924, December: Dart frees the face from the rock.
• 1925, 7 February: Dart names Australopithecus africanus in Nature.
• 1936: Robert Broom finds the first adult australopithecine at Sterkfontein.
• 1947: Arthur Keith admits that Dart was right.
• 1953: Piltdown Man is exposed as a forgery.
• 2005: Taung is added to the Fossil Hominid Sites of South Africa World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

The Taung Child was the first fossil to show that small-brained, upright-walking human relatives lived in Africa. Its long rejection is also a lesson in how expectations, prestige and even fraud can slow scientific progress. Later discoveries, from Lucy to Little Foot, have confirmed Dart’s core insight that Africa is where the human story began.