The Taung child is a petrified skull of a young Australopithecus africanus , found in 1924 in a limestone quarry near the town of Taung in South Africa . Raymond Dart described it as a new species in the journal Nature in 1925.
The skull is now kept at the University of Witwatersrand [1] .
In 1936, anthropologist Robert Broome discovered the skull of yet another "Australopithecus africanus" in the Grotto Sterkfontein, near Johannesburg. The skull was incomplete (the lower jaw was missing), it belonged to a female aged 15-16 years, so the remains were given the name "Miss Place". The geological age of the find was about 2.5 million years. "The Child from Taung" and "Miss Place" had a lot of similarities. A small head, directly set on a short neck, strongly extended forward, narrow shoulders, a narrow low forehead, a small flattened nose - all spoke of their kinship.
From that moment, the existence of Australopithecus was recognized by official science.
Notes
- ↑ Štrkalj, Goran; Kaszycka, Katarzyna (November / December 2012). "Shedding new light on an old mystery: Early photographs of the Taung Child" Archived December 2, 2017 on the Wayback Machine . South African Journal of Science .