It started as a curiosity atop a mantelpiece, a primate’s fossilized skull displayed as an interesting knickknack. Yet it would soon help unlock humans’ evolutionary story, providing the first clues to where and how humanity evolved—though not without a struggle.
It was the 1920s, and scientists were searching far and wide for fossils of human ancestors. The question of where humans evolved was open, and while Charles Darwin had claimed it might be Africa, most of the attention at the time was instead focused on Europe and Asia.
South African anatomy student Josphine Salmons noticed the skull in late 1924 at the home of her friend Pat Izod, son of the director of the Rand Minds Limited company. She showed it to Raymond Dart, her professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, who had encouraged his students to bring in any interesting fossil relics.
Dart was interested in amassing a collection of fossils at the university. Having brushed up against anatomists working on fossil human ancestors while studying in London, Dart was particularly excited by this primate skull because it of where it was found.
The presence of such a relative in South Africa meant, Dart thought, that a “tolerably complete story” of primate evolution could “yet be wrest from our rocks.” So he turned his attention to the location of the skull’s discovery, a mine near the village of Taungs, South Africa. Wondering if any other interesting fossils might emerge, Dart asked the mine manager to collect further specimens. As luck would have it, within weeks, quarry workers stumbled upon another skull that then made its way into Dart’s hands.
This 2.4-million-year-old skull (shown here with its champion Raymond Dart) upended the study of human origins despite initial rejection by the scientific community. The photograph of Raymond Dart forms part of the Wits University Archives and is published with kind permission of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa.
Photograph provided by Wits University Archives
This skull was partially encased in limestone, but Dart carefully freed it—using his wife’s sharpened knitting needles—to extract it. What emerged was a strikingly human-looking individual. It was the complete face and jaw of a small child, along with a natural cast of the brain cavity. The endocast perfectly preserved the brain’s shape on one side, while the other side was covered in “picturesque,” sparkling rock crystals.
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Wrong place, wrong time
Nicknamed the Taung Child after the nearby village, the fossil had numerous traits suggesting it was a human ancestor. Dart noted that the forehead “rises steadily” from the eye orbits in a “fashion amazingly human.” And the small canine teeth were imbedded in a slender jaw—also human-like traits. The Taung Child’s presence, Dart argued, supported Darwin’s overlooked idea, revealing Africa as the “cradle” of humankind.
While evolution had become accepted in scientific circles by the 1920s, scientific racism largely prevented Darwin’s hypothesis of humanity’s African origins from catching on. “The general thought of the time was that Africa was sort of backwards,” reflects anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer Keneiloe Molopyane. “So why would you find human origins in such a place?”
Announcing the fossil in the journal Nature in early 1925, Dart declared it a new genus and species of human ancestor: Australopithecus africanus, the southern ape from Africa. Australopithecus was a “creature well advanced” beyond our living primate relatives, he claimed, and surely an “extinct link between man and his simian ancestor.” But many in the scientific community were not so enthusiastic, and the paper met with heavy resistance.
English ancestor?
Accepting Australopithecus meant giving up Europe and Asia as possible “cradles.” It also meant casting aside other fossils that the Taung Child contradicted in terms of anatomy and theories on the pattern of evolution. Most importantly, it challenged the fossil known as the Piltdown Man. This supposed human ancestor was found in England in 1912. His large brain and apelike jaw supported a hypothesis predicting the brain would lead the way in human evolution, evolving before other distinctive human traits like walking on two feet.
“Taung was the opposite,” says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood. The hole in its skull for the spinal cord was located squarely at the bottom, suggesting a creature who had walked upright. The Taung Child’s small brain indicated that upright posture led the way rather than brain size. When compared to Piltdown, Australopithecus’s combination of ape and human-like features turned the accepted wisdom on its head.
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Many of the British scientific elite championed Piltdown Man’s place in the family tree, so Dart’s discovery seemed ludicrous to them. They dismissed the Taung Child from the human family entirely, declaring it a young chimpanzee or other, more distant relative. The loudest of them, anatomist Arthur Keith, called the idea of Australopithecus as a human ancestor “preposterous.”
Several reasons for the dismissal were openly discussed, like the ways a child’s skull might confuse evolutionary traits with those of infancy and the uncertainty of the fossil’s geologic age. But other less scientific reasons lurked beneath the surface. “It went against their worldview of something that is related to us coming from Africa,” paleoanthropologist Lauren Schroeder says.
Disheartened, Dart stashed a rejected 250-page manuscript he wrote on the fossil in a desk drawer and moved on.
Hoax revealed
Decades would pass before the scientific community would massively shift its opinion on Australopithecus, Piltdown proponent Arthur Keith went from calling the Taung Child “preposterous” in 1925 to admitting in 1947 that “Prof. Dart was right and I was wrong.” One of the biggest factors was Piltdown Man’s exposure as a fraud. In the 1940s, rumors swirled that the fossil was not it seemed. In 1953, Piltdown Man was confirmed to be a forgery crafted from a human cranium and the jaw of an orangutan, which were then strategically damaged and stained to look older.
The hoax helped move scientific attention to Africa and the fossils being uncovered there. Dart’s colleague, Robert Broom, was inspired by Taung Child and continued partnering with miners in South Africa. Benefiting from their underground tunnels and methods of blasting apart the hard rock with dynamite, Broom collected more and more fossils of Australopithecus. Most notably, the well-preserved skull of an adult nicknamed “Mrs. Ples” in 1947, followed a few months later by a partial hip and vertebrae confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt that Australopithecus were upright walkers. As these discoveries piled up, Africa’s place in the story of human origins became impossible to ignore.
This monumental acceptance of an African ancestor relocated the geography of humanity’s origins from Europe and Asia. It also helped scientists accept that our ancestors’ upright posture preceded their large brains.
Meet Lucy
The fossil record remained sparse, however, and it wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that Australopithecus would make headlines for something other than controversy. Fifty years later—almost to the day—the infamous fossil skeleton known as Lucy was uncovered.
Assigned to a new species Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy helped cement the genus as an important part of the family tree, one that lived 4-2 million years ago and likely gave rise to our own, Homo.
But by the time of Lucy’s discovery, her location was not extraordinarily controversial. Scientists had already focused their attention on Africa, so no one was shocked her fossils were found there. Nor were they surprised she was an upright walker with a relatively small brain. She was the final pin in a 20th-century saga instigated by a tiny child’s skull most of us have never heard of.
Although the Taung Child isn’t a household name, it prepared the ground for Lucy and later finds. By the time scientists stumbled across her bones in the hills of Ethiopia in the 1970s, “the soil had been tilled, fertilizer applied,” Wood says. “All you had to do was just put in the seeds and the plants came up.” Taung walked so Lucy could run.
And while the acceptance of this tiny skull took decades, Dart did ultimately get the last laugh, reflecting on the saga in his 1959 book Adventures with the Missing Link.
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