The Taung Child and the naming of Australopithecus africanus

Date

1924–1925 CE (fossil c. 2.8 million years old)

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Southern Africa (South Africa)

Era

Ancient Civilizations

Significance

In late 1924 a fossilised skull of a young hominin was recovered from the Buxton lime works near Taung, South Africa, and brought to anatomist Raymond Dart.

Recognising a mix of ape-like and human-like traits — including a forward-placed foramen magnum implying upright posture — Dart named a new species, Australopithecus africanus ('southern ape of Africa'), in a paper published in Nature in February 1925. The 'Taung Child' was among the first early-hominin fossils found in Africa and offered the first fossil support for Charles Darwin's prediction that humanity originated on that continent. At the time the claim was widely rejected: European scholars favoured an Asian or European cradle and were swayed by the later-exposed Piltdown forgery, which seemed to show a big-brained, ape-jawed ancestor. Only after Robert Broom's discoveries of adult australopithecines and broader expert support did Dart's interpretation gain acceptance, decisively redirecting the search for human origins toward Africa. Though a 20th-century discovery rather than a prehistoric event, the naming of Au. africanus was a turning point in how the deep human past was understood.

Empires active in 1924–1925 CE (fossil c. 2.8 million years old)

• Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (Oxus Civilization)
  2250 BCE – 1700 BCE
• Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilization
  2600 BCE – 1900 BCE
• Elamite Kingdom
  2700 BCE – 539 BCE
• Xia Dynasty
  2070 BCE – 1600 BCE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions: the first alphabetic writing
  c. 1850 BCE
• Development of the Linear A Script in Minoan Crete
  c. 1800 BCE
• Old Babylonian mathematics: base-60 and Plimpton 322
  c. 1800–1600 BCE
• Sintashta culture and the first spoke-wheeled war chariots
  c. 2100–2000 BCE
• Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, earliest known treatise on trauma
  c. 1600 BCE
• Rhind Mathematical Papyrus copied by the scribe Ahmes
  c. 1650 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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