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The skeleton AL 288-1 became the best-known early hominin fossil and, in 1978, part of the basis for naming Australopithecus afarensis, showing that upright walking preceded large brains.
Dart named a new genus and species, Australopithecus africanus; rejected for two decades, it was accepted as a human relative by the late 1940s.
The Oldowan became the first stone tool tradition to spread widely across Africa and into Eurasia, and it was the technological base from which the Acheulean developed.
The skull helped convince scientists that Australopithecus africanus was a hominin and became South Africa's best-known fossil.
Fossils from Olduvai were named Homo habilis in 1964, extending the genus Homo back to nearly two million years ago and tying it to the earliest stone tools.
Two partial skeletons were named Australopithecus sediba in 2010, revealing a hominin that mixed ape-like and human-like features close to the time Homo appeared.
Homo erectus became the first hominin known to spread widely across Africa and Asia and survived for more than 1.5 million years before its extinction.
The Acheulean hand axe became the most long-lived tool design in human history, made by several human species over more than 1.5 million years before giving way to Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic technologies.
The OH 5 skull revealed a robust, big-toothed hominin and, through one of the first potassium-argon dates, showed that human evolution in Africa was far older than thought.
The Nariokotome skeleton (KNM-WT 15000) gave the first detailed view of the body of Homo erectus, showing tall, long-legged, human-like proportions.
Hominins used fire at least occasionally by about 1 million years ago, and regular use of hearths became widespread after about 400,000 years ago.
The Mauer mandible became the type specimen of Homo heidelbergensis, a species often seen as a possible common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.
