Taung Child
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The Taung Child (or Taung Baby) is the fossilised skull of a young ''
Australopithecus africanus ''Australopithecus africanus'' is an extinct species of australopithecine which lived between about 3.3 and 2.1 million years ago in the Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene of South Africa. The species has been recovered from Taung, Sterkfonte ...
''. It was discovered in 1924 by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in
Taung Taung is a small town situated in the North West Province of South Africa. The name means ''place of the lion'' and was named after Tau, the King of the Barolong. ''Tau'' is the Tswana word for lion. Education High,Secondary and Middle Schools ...
,
South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...
. Raymond Dart described it as a new species in the journal ''
Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
'' in 1925. The Taung skull is in repository at the
University of Witwatersrand The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university ...
.
Dean Falk Dean Falk (born June 25, 1944) is an American academic neuroanthropologist who specializes in the evolution of the brain and cognition in higher primates. She is the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology and a Distinguished Research Professor ...
, a specialist in
brain evolution There is much to be discovered about the evolution of the brain and the principles that govern it. While much has been discovered, not everything currently known is well understood. The evolution of the brain has appeared to exhibit diverging ada ...
, has called it "the most important anthropological fossil of the twentieth century."


History


Background

In the early 20th century, the workers at limestone quarries in
Southern Africa Southern Africa is the southernmost subregion of the African continent, south of the Congo and Tanzania. The physical location is the large part of Africa to the south of the extensive Congo River basin. Southern Africa is home to a number of ...
routinely uncovered fossils from the
tufa Tufa is a variety of limestone formed when carbonate minerals precipitate out of water in unheated rivers or lakes. Geothermally heated hot springs sometimes produce similar (but less porous) carbonate deposits, which are known as travertine. ...
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 extinct fauna, which included
baboon Baboons are primates comprising the genus ''Papio'', one of the 23 genera of Old World monkeys. There are six species of baboon: the hamadryas baboon, the Guinea baboon, the olive baboon, the yellow baboon, the Kinda baboon and the chacma ba ...
s and other primates, and the more complete or somehow more interesting fossils were kept as
curiosities Curiosity (from Latin '' cūriōsitās'', from ''cūriōsus'' "careful, diligent, curious", akin to ''cura'' "care") is a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in humans ...
by the Europeans who managed operations.


Discovery

In 1924, workers at the Buxton Limeworks, near Taung, showed a fossilized primate skull to E. G. 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 realised its possible significance to her mentor, Raymond Dart. Salmons was the first female student of Dart, an anatomist at the
University of Witwatersrand The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university ...
. 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. Speirs, presented him with a collection of fossilised primate skulls that had been gathered by a miner, Mr. De Bruyn. A. E. Speirs 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 An endocast is the internal cast of a hollow object, often referring to the cranial vault in the study of brain development in humans and other organisms. Endocasts can be artificially made for examining the properties of a hollow, inaccessible sp ...
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 ''Australopithecus africanus'' is an extinct species of australopithecine which lived between about 3.3 and 2.1 million years ago in the Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene of South Africa. The species has been recovered from Taung, Sterkfonte ...
'', 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 Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
''. The fossil was soon nicknamed the Taung Child.


Initial criticism of Dart's claims


Reception

Scientists were initially reluctant to accept that the Taung Child and the new
genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus com ...
''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 The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although there were doubts about its authenticity virtually from the beginning, the remains ...
committee:
Sir Arthur Keith Sir Arthur Keith FRS FRAI (5 February 1866 – 7 January 1955) was a British anatomist and anthropologist, and a proponent of scientific racism. He was a fellow and later the Hunterian Professor and conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the ...
,
Grafton Elliot Smith Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (15 August 1871 – 1 January 1937) was an Australian-British anatomist, Egyptologist and a proponent of the hyperdiffusionist view of prehistory. He believed in the idea that cultural innovations occur only once and ...
, 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,
Arthur Keith Sir Arthur Keith FRS FRAI (5 February 1866 – 7 January 1955) was a British anatomist and anthropologist, and a proponent of scientific racism. He was a fellow and later the Hunterian Professor and conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the R ...
, 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 Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (15 August 1871 – 1 January 1937) was an Australian-British anatomist, Egyptologist and a proponent of the hyperdiffusionist view of prehistory. He believed in the idea that cultural innovations occur only once and ...
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 Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, FRS (23 May 1864 – 2 September 1944) was an English palaeontologist, known as a world expert in fossil fish. He also described the Piltdown Man fossils, which were later determined to be fraudulent. He is not relate ...
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", Arthur Keith stated in a letter to ''Nature'' that :"an examination of the casts... will satisfy geologists that this claim is preposterous. The skull is that of a young anthropoid ape... and showing so many points of affinity with the two living African anthropoids, the gorilla and chimpanzee, that there cannot be a moment's hesitation in placing the fossil form in this living group". In 1926, a year after the publication of Dart's article,
Aleš Hrdlička Alois Ferdinand Hrdlička, after 1918 changed to Aleš Hrdlička (; March 30,HRDLICKA, ALES ...
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 justification 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 the fact that the British scientific establishment had been fooled by the hoax of the
Piltdown Man The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although there were doubts about its authenticity virtually from the beginning, the remains ...
, which had a large brain and
ape Apes (collectively Hominoidea ) are a clade of Old World simians native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (though they were more widespread in Africa, most of Asia, and as well as Europe in prehistory), which together with its sister g ...
-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 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'', only two million years ago. Lastly, many people disputed the role of this fossil because of their religious affiliation. When Taung was first announced in February 1925, many anti-evolutionists began to rise up in protest of this fossil. Dart began receiving many 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 many other fossils such as
Java Man Java Man (''Homo erectus erectus'', formerly also ''Anthropopithecus erectus'', ''Pithecanthropus erectus'') is an early human fossil discovered in 1891 and 1892 on the island of Java (Dutch East Indies, now part of Indonesia). Estimated to be b ...
,
Neanderthal Man Neanderthals (, also ''Homo neanderthalensis'' and erroneously ''Homo sapiens neanderthalensis''), also written as Neandertals, are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. While the ...
, and Rhodesian Man were being discovered, and the theory of evolution was becoming more difficult to refute.
Solly Zuckerman Solomon "Solly" Zuckerman, Baron Zuckerman (30 May 1904 – 1 April 1993) was a British public servant, zoologist and operational research pioneer. He is best remembered as a scientific advisor to the Allies on bombing strategy in the Second Wo ...
, 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 deny that ''Australopithecus'' was part of the human family tree, even when that was the conclusion that had become "universally accepted" by scientists.


Acceptance

Dart's claim that ''Australopithecus africanus'', the species name that he had given to the Taung Child, was a
transitional form A transitional fossil is any fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both an ancestral group and its derived descendant group. This is especially important where the descendant group is sharply differentiated by gross a ...
between apes and humans was almost universally rejected.
Robert Broom Robert Broom FRS FRSE (30 November 1866 6 April 1951) was a British- South African doctor and palaeontologist. He qualified as a medical practitioner in 1895 and received his DSc in 1905 from the University of Glasgow. From 1903 to 1910, he ...
, 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 Robustness is the property of being strong and healthy in constitution. When it is transposed into a system, it refers to the ability of tolerating perturbations that might affect the system’s functional body. In the same line ''robustness'' ca ...
fossils, which were eventually renamed '' Australopithecus robustus'' (AKA ''Paranthropus robustus''). Even after Dart chose to take a break from his work in anthropology, Broom undertook more excavations, and slowly began to find more ''Australopithecus africanus'' specimens that proved Dart was correct in his analysis of the Taung Child; it did have human-like morphology. 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.'' In the late 1920s, American paleontologist
William King Gregory William King Gregory (May 19, 1876 – December 29, 1970) was an American zoologist, renowned as a primatologist, paleontologist, and functional and comparative anatomist. He was an expert on mammalian dentition, and a leading contributor t ...
also accepted that ''Australopithecus'' was part of the human
family tree A family tree, also called a genealogy or a pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. More detailed family trees, used in medicine and social work, are known as genograms. Representations of ...
. Employed by the
American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 inter ...
in New York, Gregory supported
Charles Darwin Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended fr ...
and
Thomas Henry Huxley Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He has become known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The stori ...
's then-unpopular view that humans were closely related to African apes. The director of the museum, however, was
Henry Fairfield Osborn Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. (August 8, 1857 – November 6, 1935) was an American paleontologist, geologist and eugenics advocate. He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years and a cofounder of the American Euge ...
; despite being "the chief public defender of evolution in the United States" at the time of the Scopes Trial in 1925, he disagreed with Darwin's views on the origins of humanity. Gregory and Osborn repeatedly debated the issue in public forums, but Osborn's view that humans had evolved from early ancestors who did not look like apes prevailed among American anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1938, Gregory visited South Africa and saw the Taung Child and the fossils that Broom had recently discovered. More convinced than ever that Dart and Broom were right, he called ''Australopithecus africanus'' "the missing link no longer missing". The turning point in the acceptance of Dart's analysis of the Taung Child came in 1947, when the prominent British anthropologist
Wilfrid Le Gros Clark Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark (5 June 1895 – 28 June 1971) was a British anatomist, surgeon, primatologist and palaeoanthropologist, today best remembered for his contribution to the study of human evolution. He was Dr Lee's Professor of ...
announced that he supported it. Le Gros Clark, who would also play an important role in exposing the fraud of the Piltdown Man in 1953, visited Johannesburg in late 1946 to study Dart's Taung skull and Broom's adult fossils, with the intention of proving that they were only apes. After two weeks of studies and visiting the caves in which Broom had found his fossils (the Taung cave had been destroyed by miners soon after the discovery of the Taung skull), however, Clark became convinced that these fossils were
hominids The Hominidae (), whose members are known as the great apes or hominids (), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: '' Pongo'' (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); ''Gorilla'' (the ...
rather than pongids. In 1947, Sir Arthur Keith published in ''Nature'', announcing his support of Dart and Broom's research. He stated "the evidence submitted by Dr. Robert Broom and Professor Dart was right and I was wrong", agreeing that with the new evidence along with the Taung Fossil indicated that this fossil was human-like in posture, dental elements, and its bipedal walk. In early January 1947, at the First Pan-African Congress on Prehistory,
Wilfrid Le Gros Clark Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark (5 June 1895 – 28 June 1971) was a British anatomist, surgeon, primatologist and palaeoanthropologist, today best remembered for his contribution to the study of human evolution. He was Dr Lee's Professor of ...
was the first anthropologist of such stature to call the Taung Child a "hominid": an early human. An anonymous article, published in ''Nature'' on 15 February 1947, announced Clark's conclusions to a wider public. On that day, Keith, who had been one of Dart's most virulent critics, composed a letter to the editor of ''Nature'' announcing that he supported Clark's analysis: "I was one of those who took the point of view that when the adult form f ''Australopithecus''was discovered it would prove to be near akin to the living African anthropoidsthe gorilla and the chimpanzee. I am now convinced... that Prof. Dart was right and that I was wrong. The Australopithecinae are in or near the line which culminated in the human form". As
Roger Lewin Roger Lewin (born 1944) is a British prize-winning science writer and author of 20 books. Career Lewin was a staff member of ''New Scientist'' in London for nine years. He went to Washington, D.C. to write for ''Science (journal), Science'' fo ...
put it in his book ''Bones of Contention'', "a prompter and more thorough capitulation could hardly be imagined".


Identification

Dart drew conclusions that were unavoidably controversial due to the lack of more fossil evidence at the time. The idea that the skull belonged to a new genus was identified by comparison with skulls of chimpanzees. Its skull was larger than a fully-grown chimpanzee's. The forehead of the chimpanzee receded to form a heavy browridge and a jutting jaw; the Taung Child's forehead recedes but leaves no browridge. Its '' foramen magnum'', a void in the cranium, where the spinal cord is continuous with the brain, is beneath the cranium so the creature must have stood upright. This is an indication of bipedal locomotion.
Dean Falk Dean Falk (born June 25, 1944) is an American academic neuroanthropologist who specializes in the evolution of the brain and cognition in higher primates. She is the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology and a Distinguished Research Professor ...
, a specialist in neuroanatomy, noted that Dart had not fully considered certain apelike attributes for Taung. :"In his 1925 article, Dart had claimed that the brain of Taung was humanlike. As it turned out, he was wrong about that.... Taung's humanlike features were overemphasized". This mainly pertains to the lunate sulcas, which Dart had described as having human-like placement, Upon further examination however, Falk determined that these patterns were much more similar to that of an ape's similar sized brain. This however was of great debate as the sulcas was not incredibly visible on the endocast, as it often is not in apes.
Ralph Holloway Ralph Leslie Holloway, Jr. (born 1935) is a physical anthropologist at Columbia University and research associate with the American Museum of Natural History. Since obtaining his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, Holloway ha ...
stood in opposition of this idea as he had long been known as a supporter of Dart's analysis of Taung. He believed that the sulcus would be in the area of the
lambdoid The lambdoid suture (or lambdoidal suture) is a dense, fibrous connective tissue joint on the posterior aspect of the skull that connects the parietal bones with the occipital bone. It is continuous with the occipitomastoid suture. Structure Th ...
structure. Falk however, believed the sulcas was placed higher on the skull, in a more ape-like manner. However, studies surrounding this have been controversial, as there is no concrete place on the brain where they can place these features. Paleoneurologists have been tasked with looking at various depressions in the brain and attempting to determine what they are. These scientists are often met with skepticism, just as Falk in her continued support of an ape-like placement of the lunate sulcas. However, now many professionals believe that the sulcas is not visible in Taung and many other ''Australopithecus africanus'' specimens. However, a newer endocast specimen title Stw 505 has been examined, and many believe that it supports Dart's hypothesis, but this aspect of Taung is still highly debated, and many still believe it has ape-like placement. Subsequently, Falk unearthed an unpublished manuscript that Dart completed in 1929 in the Archives of the University of Witwatersrand, which provides a much more thorough description and analysis of the Taung endocast than Dart's earlier announcement in ''Nature''. This was barred from being published to Dart's dismay in 1931. It remains unpublished in these archives where very few are able to appreciate it. In this writing Falk discovered that she and Dart had come to similar conclusions surrounding the evolutionary process of the brain that Taung indicates. Whereas Dart had identified only two potential
sulci Sulci or Sulki (in Greek , Steph. B., Ptol.; , Strabo; , Paus.), was one of the most considerable cities of ancient Sardinia, situated in the southwest corner of the island, on a small island, now called Isola di Sant'Antioco, which is, how ...
on the Taung endocast in 1925, he identified and illustrated 14 additional sulci in this still-unpublished monograph. There, too, Dart detailed how Taung's endocast was expanded globally in three different regions, contrary to the suggestion that he believed hominin brains evolved back-end-first, in a so-called mosaic fashion. This goes against Holloway's interpretation as he has indicated that the back area of the brain evolved before other regions of the brain, but it stands in agreement with Falk's belief that the brain evolved equally in a coordinated fashion instead.


Description

The fossil has most of the face and mandible with teeth and, uniquely, a natural
endocast An endocast is the internal cast of a hollow object, often referring to the cranial vault in the study of brain development in humans and other organisms. Endocasts can be artificially made for examining the properties of a hollow, inaccessible sp ...
of the braincase. It is estimated to be 2.3 million years old. Originally thought to have belonged to a monkey or ape, the skull, as Dart realized, must have been positioned directly above the spine, indicating an upright posture. That is a trait seen in humans but unknown in other primates. The Taung Child was originally thought to have been about six years old at death because of the presence of
deciduous teeth Deciduous teeth or primary teeth, also informally known as baby teeth, milk teeth, or temporary teeth,Illustrated Dental Embryology, Histology, and Anatomy, Bath-Balogh and Fehrenbach, Elsevier, 2011, page 255 are the first set of teeth in the ...
, but it is now believed to have been about three or four, based on studies of rates of enamel deposition on the teeth. There was some debate over the age of this creature initially because it was unclear if it grew at the speed of a human, or of an ape. Compared to an ape, it would have been aged about 4 years, and compared to a human, it would have been aged around 5–7 years old. Comparison of the Taung Child fossil to the skull of a nine-year-old modern child suggest that ''A. africanus'' had a growth rate to adolescence more similar to that of modern apes, like chimpanzees (genus '' Pan''), than to that of modern ''
Homo sapiens Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
''. The creature stood tall and weighed between . It had 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 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 resembled a chimpanzee, the overall shorter shape was human-like. Likewise the lower portion of the face was protruded albeit 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 announced the Taung Child probably was killed by an
eagle Eagle is the common name for many large birds of prey of the family Accipitridae. Eagles belong to several groups of genera, some of which are closely related. Most of the 68 species of eagle are from Eurasia and Africa. Outside this area, just ...
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.


See also

* Selam (''Australopithecus'') *
List of human evolution fossils The following tables give an overview of notable finds of Hominini, hominin fossils and Skeleton, remains relating to human evolution, beginning with the formation of the tribe Hominini (the divergence of the Chimpanzee–human last common ancest ...
*
List of fossil sites This list of fossil sites is a worldwide list of localities known well for the presence of fossils. Some entries in this list are notable for a single, unique find, while others are notable for the large number of fossils found there. Many of t ...


References


Works cited

* (paperback). * * * * * * * * * * * * * . * * * *


External links

*
Downloadable 30 minute analysis by the BBC

NPR Radiolab podcast about the Taung Child
(also contains some ancillary material) {{Cradle of Humankind Archaeological discoveries in South Africa Deaths due to animal attacks Australopithecus fossils North West (South African province) Prehistoric Africa Prehistoric South Africa 1924 archaeological discoveries Archaeology of Southern Africa Archaeological history of Southern Africa