The Taung Child (or Taung Baby) is the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus. It was discovered in Taung, South Africa in 1924 and described as a new species and genus by Raymond Dart in 1925. The skull was one of the first early hominin fossils to be found in Africa, and the first evidence that humanity originated from the continent.
The Taung skull is in repository at the University of the Witwatersrand. Dean Falk, a specialist in brain evolution, has called it "the most important anthropological fossil of the twentieth century." It revealed the existence of a group of hominins that were bipedal but had brains no larger than those of chimpanzees.
Description Dart initially identified three major traits which suggested that the fossil was ancestral to Humans. The brain structure was more human. The foramen magnum was in a forward position, indicating bipedality. The canines were reduced.
The Taung Child was originally thought to have been about six years old at death because of the presence of deciduous teeth, but is now believed to have been about three or four, based on studies of rates of enamel deposition on the teeth. Many scientists debated the Taung Child's age, as it was unclear if they grew at the speed of a human, or of an ape. Compared to an ape, they would have been aged about 4 years, and compared to a human, they would have been aged around 5–7 years old. The skull has a cranial capacity of 400–500 cc, which is comparable to that of a modern adult chimpanzee. Because mature brain size is attained within the first few years of life, the relatively small size is unlikely to be attributed to the specimen being a juvenile. The skull also possesses features more commonly found in humans than apes, including a rising forehead and round eye sockets. Although the lower portion of the nose resembles a chimpanzee, the overall shorter shape is human-like. Likewise, the lower portion of the face is protruded, though to a lesser degree than in modern apes. A bony shelf found within the inner jaw of apes could not be found. Dart opted to describe the remains as a "man-ape" rather than as an "ape-man" to highlight the more human features present compared to the remains found of the more recent Pithecanthropus erectus.
In 2006, Lee Berger suggested the Taung Child probably was killed by an eagle or other large predatory bird, citing the similarity of the damage to the skull and eye sockets of the Taung Child to that seen in modern primates that are known to have been killed by eagles. There are talon marks in the eyes as well as a depression along the skull that is common in creatures that have been preyed upon by eagles.
History
Background In the early 20th century, the workers at limestone quarries in Southern Africa routinely uncovered fossils from the tufa formations that they mined. The tufa did not form consistently, and over time cavities were left open and they became beneficial areas for animals to take shelter in. As a result, many bones began to build up in these areas. These areas were mostly sandstone, and they stood in the way of successful mining. So, miners would use explosives to clear these areas, and discard all the debris. However, many fossils began to show up, and these were saved by many of the miners. Many were of an extinct fauna, which included baboons and other primates, and the more complete or somehow more interesting fossils were kept as curiosities by the Europeans who managed operations.
Discovery In 1924, workers at the Buxton Limeworks in Taung, showed a fossilized primate skull to Edwin Gilbert Izod, the visiting director of the Northern Lime Company, the managing company of the quarry. The director gave it to his son, Pat Izod, who displayed it on the mantle over the fireplace. When Josephine Salmons, a friend of the Izod family, paid a visit to Pat's home, she noticed the primate skull, identified it as from an extinct monkey and realising its possible significance mentioned it to her mentor, Raymond Dart.
Salmons was the first female student of Dart, an anatomist at the University of Witwatersrand. Salmons was permitted to take the fossilized skull and presented it to Dart, who also recognized it as a significant find. Dart asked the company to send any more interesting fossilized skulls that were unearthed. When a consulting geologist, Robert Young, paid a visit to the quarry office, the director, A. E. Spiers, presented him with a collection of fossilised primate skulls that had been gathered by a miner, Mr. De Bruyn. A. E. Spiers was using a particular fossil as a paperweight, and Young asked him for this as well. Young sent some of the skulls back to Dart. When Dart examined the contents of the crate, he found a fossilized endocast of a skull showing the impression of a complex brain. He quickly searched through the rest of the fossils in the crates, and matched it to a fossilized skull of a juvenile primate, which had a shallow face and fairly small teeth.
Only forty days after he first saw the fossil, Dart completed a paper that named the species of Australopithecus africanus, the "southern ape from Africa", and described it as "an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man". The paper appeared in the 7 February 1925 issue of the journal Nature. The fossil was soon nicknamed the Taung Child. It is the holotype of Australopithecus africanus with the accession number Taung 1.
Initial criticism of Dart's claims
Reception Scientists were initially reluctant to accept that the Taung Child and the new genus Australopithecus were ancestral to modern humans. In the issue of Nature immediately following the one in which Dart's paper was published, several authorities in British paleoanthropology criticized Dart's conclusion. Three of the four scholars were members of the Piltdown Man committee: Sir Arthur Keith, Grafton Elliot Smith, and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. They were much more skeptical about this fossil's place in evolutionary history, and believed it deserved to be categorized as a chimp or gorilla rather than a human ancestor. However, Dart still had the hesitant support of W.L.H. Duckworth, but he still asked for more information on the brain to support this claim.
Dart's former mentor, Keith, one of the most prominent anatomists of his time, claimed that there was insufficient evidence to accept Dart's claim that Australopithecus was transitional between apes and humans. Grafton Elliot Smith stated that he needed more evidence and a larger picture of the skull before he could judge the significance of the new fossil. Arthur Smith Woodward dismissed the Taung Child as having "little bearing" on the issue of "whether the direct ancestors of man are to be sought in Asia or Africa".
The critiques became more fervent a few months later. Elliot Smith concluded that the Taung fossil was "essentially identical" to the skull of "the infant gorilla and chimpanzee". Infant apes appear more human like because of the "shape of their forehead and the lack of fully developed brow ridges". Addressing the claim that the fossil was "the missing link between ape and human", Keith stated in a letter to Nature that
In 1926, a year after the publication of Dart's article, Aleš Hrdlička reviewed and approved German and Portuguese articles for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Both articles asserted that the Taung Child should not be placed within the human phylum due to a lack of evidence for the classification. The next year, Hrdlička personally commented on another of Dart's articles, this time in Natural History, saying that the author "very ingeniously, but, it seems obvious, more or less artificially, endeavors to humanize the 'Australopithecus'. It is not known that this effort thus far has found favor with any other student who gave truly earnest and critical attention to the otherwise very interesting and important Taung relic."
Reasons for dissent There were several reasons that it took decades for the field to accept Dart's claim that Australopithecus africanus was in the human line of descent. First and foremost was that the British scientific establishment had been fooled by the hoax of the Piltdown Man, which had a large brain and ape-like teeth. Expecting human ancestors to have evolved a large brain very early, they found that the Taung Child's small brain and human-like teeth made it an unlikely ancestor to modern humans.
Secondly, until the 1940s, most anthropologists believed that humans had evolved in Asia, not in Africa.
A third reason is that, despite accepting that modern humans had emerged by evolution, many anthropologists believed that the genus Homo had split from the great apes during the Oligocene (now known to have been as long as 30 million years ago) and so felt uneasy about accepting that humans had a small-brained, ape-like ancestor, like Australopithecus africanus, dating from the Pleistocene (later to be established at only 2 million years ago).
Lastly, many people disputed the role of this fossil because of its presumed conflict with religious teachings. When Taung was first announced in February 1925, many who did not believe the theory of evolution was scientifically backed up began to rise up in protest of this fossil. Dart began receiving threats from members of various religious communities that proclaimed his ideas blasphemous. Some were able to reconcile the science with the religious theology through the lens of "creation science", but there was still significant opposition. However, by this time, a couple other fossils such as Java Man, Neanderthal Man, and Rhodesian Man had been discovered, further supporting the theory of evolution.
Solly Zuckerman, who had studied anatomy under Dart in South Africa, concluded as early as 1928 that Australopithecus was little more than an ape. He and a four-member team carried out further studies of the australopithecine family in the 1940s and 1950s. Using a "metrical and statistical approach" that he thought was superior to purely descriptive methods, he decided that the creatures had not walked on two legs and so were not an intermediate form between humans and apes. For the rest of his life, Zuckerman continued to conclude that Australopithecus was not part of the human family tree, even though that was the conclusion that had become "universally accepted" by many scientists.
Acceptance
Dart's claim that Australopithecus africanus, the species name that he had given to the Taung Child, was a transitional form between apes and humans was almost universally rejected. Robert Broom, a Scottish doctor who worked in South Africa, was one of the few scientists to believe Dart. Two weeks after Dart announced the discovery of the Taung Child in Nature, Broom visited Dart in Johannesburg to see the fossil. After he became a paleontologist in 1933, Broom found adult fossils of Australopithecus africanus and discovered more robust fossils, which were named Paranthropus robustus (also known as Australopithecus robustus). Even after Dart chose to take a break from his work in anthropology, Broom undertook more excavations, and slowly began to find more specimens that caused scientists to conclude that Dart must have been correct in his analysis of the Taung Child; it did have human-like features. In 1946, Broom and his colleague Gerrit Schepers published a volume consolidating all the information they had found about Australopithecus africanus in a volume titled The South African Fossil Men: The Australopithecinae.