Coming face to face with Taung Child – a humbling experience

The near complete skull and lower jaw of Taung Child, the fossil discovered in 1924 that simultaneously transformed the science of archaeology and the story of our human evolution.

Taung Child – the South African fossil discovery that rewrote the story of our human origins.

Until Raymond Dart’s discovery of Taung Child  in 1924 (in Taung, in what is now the North West province of South Africa), the accepted wisdom was that humans originated in Europe, an offshoot of Neanderthals and other near relatives.

Dart’s discovery – of a partial skull and face of a child with a full set of teeth – marked a defining moment in both the evolution of the science of archaeology and our understanding of human evolution.

Dart contended that Austalopithicus africanus as he called Taung (‘the southern ape from Africa’), confirmed Charles Darwin’s hunch that humans originated in Africa. This met with derision from the European-based establishment – until subsequent fossil finds in the 1930s at Sterkfontein and Makapansgat north of Johannesburg revealed that Austalopithicus africanus had indeed stood upright and had indeed walked like humans.Taung Child was thus finally accepted as a missing link between humans and the apes. And Africa became accepted as the Cradle of Humankind. The science of archaeology and palaeoanthropology was fundamentally changed.

I was privileged to meet the original fossil of Taung Child recently – gently resting on a black velvet base encased in reinforced glass – on an Archaeology Society tour of the Fossil Vault at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.  It was a humbling experience: coming face to face with the child fossil that one hundred years ago simultaneously transformed the science of archaeology and the story of our human evolution.

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