The Taung Skull – small enough to fit in the palm of a hand – was that of a three or four-year-old child, and much smaller than a modern human of the same age. He later wrote: “I doubt if there was any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my Taung baby that Christmas of 1924.” Two days before Christmas, he finally freed the child from the rock. Here in lime-consolidated sand was the replica of a brain three times as large as that of a baboon and considerably bigger than that of an adult chimpanzee.”įor three months, Dart scratched the skull from its rocky matrix using his wife’s sharpened knitting needles. But I knew at a glance that what lay in my hands was no ordinary anthropoidal brain. Had it been only the fossilised brain cast of any species of ape it would have ranked as a great discovery, for such a thing had never before been reported. “On the very top of the rock heap was what was undoubtedly an endocranial cast or mould of the interior of the skull. It belonged to the Taung Child, and was to become one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries ever made.ĭart wrote of the moment in his book, Adventures with the Missing Link: When he removed the lid from the second box, Dart was amazed to see the fossilised cast of a tiny brain on top of the pile. The fossils had been sent by his geologist colleague, Professor RB Young, from the Buxton Limeworks in the small town of Taung, about 150 km (95 mi) from Kimberley, in what is now the North West Province of South Africa and which now forms a part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. One Saturday in 1924, a young scientist, Dr Raymond Dart, anĪustralian by birth who studied in England and had come out to South Africa as head of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Department of Anatomy, received two large wooden boxes containing fossils at the door of his house, just as he was preparing to attend a wedding. Australopithecus anamensis, found in Kenya, is the most ape-like and oldest of the australopithecines, dating to between 4.2-million and 3.9-million years ago. Remains of other early species of Australopithecus have been found in East Africa.Īustralopithecus afarensis, which lived between 3.6-million and 3-million years ago, has been found at Laetoli in Tanzania, where footprint trails of Australopithecus were uncovered in 1978, and at Hadar in Ethiopia, including the famous Lucy skeleton discovered in 1973. Other hominid remains dating to a similar time have also been recovered from the Jacovec Cavern at Sterkfontein.Īustralopithecus has also been found at Makapans Valley in South Africa’s Limpopo Province, which is part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. The species to which the skeleton belongs will only be determined when it has been completely extracted from the rock in which it lies embedded. “Little Foot”, which is still being excavated from Sterkfontein Member 2, is one of the oldest australopithecines ever found, dating to between 4.1-million and 3.3-million years old, according to palaeomagnetic evidence and cosmogenic isotope dating. He observed the same features in Sts 71, and suggested these, plus some other large-toothed hominids from Sterkfontein and the Makapans Valley, represent another Australopithecus which lived at the same time as Australopithecus africanus. Palaeoanthropologist Professor Ron Clarke has argued that Stw 252 appears very different from Australopithecus africanus in that it has much larger teeth, a flatter upper face, a thinner brow region and a differently shaped braincase. These include several specimens, such as Stw 252, and Sts 71, discovered by Broom and his colleague, John Robinson, in 1947. These include the lesser known cranial specimens Sts 17 and Sts 52, and a partial skeleton, Sts 14, found in 1947, which had a complete pelvis that affirmed that Australopithecus was bipedal, or walked upright.īut there are other australopithecines discovered at the Sterkfontein Caves and at Makapans Valley, about 300 km (480 mi) from Sterkfontein, near Mokopane in Limpopo Province, which may not be Australopithecus africanus. Sts 5 (Mrs Ples), which he discovered in 1947, and many other specimens found in Sterkfontein Member 4, also belong to this species. The first adult specimen of an Australopethicus was discovered in 1936 at Sterkfontein by palaeontologist and director of the Transvaal Museum, Dr Robert Broom.
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