The Taung Child: The Fossil That Put Africa First

Late in 1924, two crates of rock from a limestone quarry near the town of Taung arrived at the house of Raymond Dart, a 31-year-old Australian anatomy professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. As Dart later told the story, he was dressing to be best man at a friend’s wedding in his own home when he opened them.

In the second crate was a natural stone cast of the inside of a skull — an endocast, formed when sediment filled the braincase and hardened. It fitted into a block of rock containing a face. Dart spent the next weeks freeing it, reportedly using his wife’s sharpened knitting needles. On 23 December the face came clear: a child, with a full set of milk teeth and its first permanent molars just emerging.

The Taung Child would become the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus, the “southern ape of Africa”. It would also cost Dart two decades of ridicule.

What Dart saw

Dart’s paper, “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa”, appeared in Nature on 7 February 1925, astonishingly quickly. He made three key observations.

The hole for the spinal cord

The foramen magnum, the opening where the spinal cord leaves the skull, sits further forward in the Taung skull than in an ape. That means the head balanced on top of a vertical spine. Dart inferred an upright walker from a skull alone — a bold claim that later skeletons proved right.

The teeth

The canines were small and the tooth row human-like in shape, unlike the dagger canines of apes.

The brain

The endocast was small — about 400 cc in the child, comparable to a chimpanzee — but Dart argued its surface pattern showed human-like reorganisation. That last claim remains debated; the first two have held up.

Why the experts said no

The response from London was cold. Arthur Keith, Grafton Elliot Smith and Arthur Smith Woodward — the establishment that had embraced Piltdown Man — judged the skull to be a young ape, most likely related to the chimpanzee or gorilla. Their objections were not all unreasonable:

• It was a child. Young apes look more human-like than adults: flatter faces, rounder heads. An infant skull was a risky basis for a new human relative.
• Africa seemed the wrong place. Asia, home of the Java Man fossils, was the favoured cradle of humanity.
• It had the wrong pattern. Piltdown said big brains came first. Taung had a small brain and human-like teeth and posture — the reverse.
• Dart was young and remote, working far from the major museums, and his speedy publication struck some as brash.

Vindication

Dart’s strongest ally was Robert Broom, a Scottish doctor and palaeontologist. From 1936 Broom found adult australopiths at Sterkfontein, Kromdraai and Swartkrans, including the beautifully complete cranium Sts 5, nicknamed “Mrs Ples”, in 1947. Adults answered the “it’s just a juvenile ape” objection. Hip and leg bones confirmed upright walking.

In 1947 Arthur Keith publicly conceded that Dart had been right. In 1953 Piltdown was exposed as a fake, removing the last major rival pattern. Then came Mary and Louis Leakey’s finds at Olduvai Gorge, and later Lucy. Africa went from unlikely to undisputed.

How old was the Taung Child?

Dart assumed a human-like pace of growth and estimated about six years old. In 1985 Timothy Bromage and Christopher Dean counted microscopic growth lines on australopith teeth and found that they grew on a fast, ape-like schedule. The Taung Child was probably closer to three years old — an important early finding that australopiths did not share our long, slow childhood.

The geological age is harder. The original quarry deposits were destroyed by mining, and the child is usually placed at around 2.8 million years, with estimates ranging from about 2.6 to 3 million.

Killed by an eagle

For decades Dart’s view was that australopiths were killers themselves, and that broken bones at their sites were the remains of a violent “osteodontokeratic” (bone-tooth-horn) culture. Later work reversed the picture: australopiths were far more often prey. (See the predators that hunted Australopithecus.)

In 1995 Lee Berger, who would later lead the team that found Australopithecus sediba at Malapa, and Ron Clarke noted that the animal bones found with the Taung Child — small monkeys, hyraxes, tortoise and bird eggshell — looked like the debris beneath a large eagle’s nest. In 2006 Berger identified the clincher: puncture holes and raked, broken bone in the floor of both eye sockets. Modern African crowned eagles leave exactly this damage when their talons grip a monkey’s head. The oldest child in the human fossil record for a time was, in all likelihood, snatched by a bird.

Why Taung still matters

The Taung skull, now held at the University of the Witwatersrand, did three things at once. It moved the centre of human origins to Africa. It showed that upright posture and small teeth came before a large brain. And through its teeth, it hinted that the slow childhood we take for granted is a late evolutionary arrival.

Not bad for a toddler in a box of quarry rubble.