The First Australopithecus, 1925

The discovery of the 2.5-million-year-old Taung Child skull marked a turning point in the study of human brain evolution.

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FIRST OF ITS KIND: Raymond Dart’s classification of the approximately 2.5-million-year-old Taung Child skull as an upright-walking hominin was met with skepticism by contemporaries who argued its brain size was too small to merit such a classification. SCIENCE SOURCE

Australian anatomy professor Raymond Dart was adjusting the collar of his dress suit in preparation for a friend’s wedding when a box, shipped from a limestone quarry near Taung, South Africa, arrived at the doorstep of his Johannesburg home in November 1924. Dart abandoned his collar to dig through the package’s contents—all the while ignoring the grumblings of his wife and the groom, who were anxious to begin the wedding ceremony. Inside the box, he found a fossilized mold of a brain and a matching child’s skull partially buried in stone. Dart quickly realized the significance of the finding, and by February 1925 had published an article in Nature identifying a new species: Australopithecus africanus. The 2.5-million-year-old “Taung Child” or “Taung Baby,” as Dart called ...

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