The Taung Child
A juvenile skull from a South African quarry is the first evidence that humanity began in Africa.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 thousand years
- Era
- Pliocene, Cenozoic
The Taung Child is the fossilised face, jaw and natural endocast of a young Australopithecus africanus, recovered from a limeworks in 1924 and described by Raymond Dart in 1925. Dart argued from the forward position of the foramen magnum that it walked upright, and that Africa, not Asia or Europe, was the human homeland. The British establishment dismissed him for twenty years, partly because Piltdown Man had primed them to expect a large brain first. Damage to the eye sockets was later matched to an eagle: the child was killed by a bird of prey.