The first Australianthecus africanus fossil skull and brain, known as the Taung Child.Credit: Patrick Landmann/Science Photo Library
On February 7, 1925, Nature published an article about strange fossils excavated in South Africa1. “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-ape of South Africa” was sent by Australian paleontologist Raymond Dart, who was then at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa. In his memoir, the adventures of Missing Link (1959), Dart is distracted by the delivery of two large rocks, including the face of Australopithecas and the Braincast (known as the Endcast), and he said he was dressed for the wedding. – An internal cast of brains formed from deposits attached to the skull, like the balls on a baseball pitcher’s mitt.
The specimen’s origin – the lime wall and adjacent farmland in a town in South Africa – was already known as the source of monkey fossils. In 1921, a human-like Skull2 was discovered in a mine near a broken hill in what is now Kabwe, Zambia. In the human descent (1871), Charles Darwin predicted that the roots of the human lineage would be in Africa. Although Australopithecus had precedents, Dart’s discovery was the beginning of a century-long journey of discovery that confirmed Darwin’s predictions.
100 years of Australian Pithecus
Nature presents two collections commemorating this anniversary, along with nature Africa, nature communication, and nature’s ecology and evolution. The first includes 100 papers that chart this journey and reveal the parts that this journal played in documenting it. The second delves into the field of paleontology from the perspective of today’s African scientists.
The skull that ordered the attention of the dirt was intermediate to what had been previously found. It belongs to non-human apes, but as anthropologist Dean Faulk at Florida State University in Tallahassee explains in this issue’s essay, the skull also had human-like characteristics. Foramen Magnum – the hole in which the spinal cord enters the skull – is located below the skull rather than behind it, indicating that the owner was upright. The shape of the face and endcast seemed to be at the top.
The jaw also looked more human than the jaw of the Eon Solopas Dawson or Piltdown Man. A “missing link” between humans and other apes in the village of Piltdown in England, described in 1912. The same capacity as the gorilla’s capacity. However, the skull was clearly belonging to a small child. Dart concluded that the fossils established predictions of Darwinian African origin.
“Taung Child” Fossils Provide Clues on Childhood Evolution
Trenchant’s criticism has become thick and faster. London-based anthropology Grandie noted that since humans and other ape boys appear to be similar, Australopithecus could have become a non-human ape like that. They may also have been troubled by Dirt’s comments about the human-like jaws of Australopithecus. At the time, it was thought that the large human brain evolved in front of the human-like jaw and remaining skeleton. Thus, upright apes with small brains and human-like jaws were against grain.
It took decades before Piltdownman was exposed as a hoax, a mashup of the skull of a modern human and orangutan jaw, and Australopithecus was recognized as more human-like than other apes. Meanwhile, physician paraeontologist Robert Bloom had begun excavating more Australopithecus fossils, showing that the dart specimens were not flukes. And the course was set up.
Ultimately, the focus of human origin research shifted from South Africa to East Africa, and Louis Leakey’s name began to appear in the scientific record, but in that era, in too many sub-editors, he is listed in his first Nature Paper Stone in Kenya’s colony age group ”Leaky’3.
Taung Child: Celebrating 100 Years
Leakey, the son of a missionary who came to Kenya to preach to the Kikuyu community, founded a fossil-hunting dynasty, which was his second wife, Mary (Nekol). The Nutcracker Man in 1959 in the All-By Valley in Tanzania).
Nature has become Leakey’s field diary. In the early 1990s, John Maddox, then editor-in-chief of the Journal, explained to Leakey’s son Richard, another prominent paleontologist (in the presence of this editor’s author). (Astronomer) Fred Hoyle and your dad.” Richard was visiting the Journal’s London office and commented on a natural paper describing the astonishing fossils of Ethiopia. He said his wife, paleontologist Move Leakey (néeepps), reported an equally exciting discovery. Nature later also published her paper on the species of humanity from 4 million years ago in Kenya 6.
Ethiopia had been on paleontological maps by then. Other countries in Africa quickly joined it, and important fossils found in Chad7, Malawi8 and Morocco9. And nature was there to document all new bones and teeth. Today, West Africa is in the framework for new and exciting discoveries.
As they say, it was another country, and it was for 1925. Nature at the time often becomes harsh reading – paternal, male-dominated, imperialists, colonialists, and sometimes naked racists. If Dart’s paper was submitted today, it would include at least a few other names, especially Josephine Salmons, a student demonstrator from the same university and Josephine Salmons, anatomy demonstrator from the same university as Dart. Ta.
Things have changed, but the field of Palaeoanthropology10 was slow to recognize the contributions of many women, including salmon and African scholars who made important discoveries. One such researcher was Kamoya Kimeu, one of the greatest observers of human origin, who passed away in 2022. His successor is increasingly leading research. The collection aims to celebrate all those who contributed to humanity’s evolving understanding of this part of the human story. People may have changed, but Africa remains the mind of human origin.
