The discovery that rewrote human origins

In November 1924, a crate of fossils arrived at the desk of Raymond Dart, professor of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The crate had been assembled by a student, Josephine Salmons, who had received a fossilised baboon skull from a colleague employed at the Buxton Limeworks quarry near Taung. Among the fossils in the crate, Dart recognised something extraordinary: a natural endocast — a perfect stone mould of a brain — and, embedded in a block of limestone, the facial bones of a juvenile primate unlike anything previously described. Working with a knitting needle borrowed from his fiancée to chip away the surrounding rock, Dart spent 73 days excavating the skull, which gradually revealed human-like teeth, eye sockets oriented forwards like those of humans rather than outwards like those of apes, and a brain larger than that of any known ape relative to body size.

Dart published his identification in Nature on 7 February 1925, naming the fossil Australopithecus africanus and arguing that it was a connecting link between apes and humans — and therefore that Africa, not Asia, was the cradle of humanity. The response from the British scientific establishment was immediate and almost uniformly hostile. The leading paleoanthropologists of the era, including Arthur Keith, Elliot Smith, and Arthur Smith Woodward (who had championed the fraudulent Piltdown Man as evidence of Asian origins), dismissed the Taung Child as a juvenile ape — specifically, they argued, a young chimpanzee or gorilla, whose juvenile skull bones would naturally appear more human-like. The controversy persisted for two decades. It was only through the work of Robert Broom, who from the late 1930s discovered additional adult Australopithecus specimens at Sterkfontein, Kromdraai, and Swartkrans, that the scientific community gradually accepted Dart’s original interpretation. The full vindication came with molecular genetics in the 1980s–1990s, which confirmed Africa as the point of origin of the human lineage.

The Taung Child fossil itself was also the subject of a separate discovery decades later: in 2006, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger (who would later direct the discovery of Homo naledi at Rising Star Cave) identified marks on the Taung Child skull consistent with predation by a large eagle — suggesting the child was killed and partially eaten by an eagle, whose talons and beak left characteristic damage patterns on the eye sockets and the back of the skull. The evidence supports the idea that hominins of 2.8 million years ago were prey animals as much as hunters.