Taung Child

Taung Child

Catalog number	Taung 1
Common name	Taung Child
Species	Australopithecus africanus
Age	About 2.8 mya or 3.3 years when deceased
Place discovered	Taung, South Africa
Date discovered	1924

The Taung Child (or Taung Baby) is the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus individual. It was discovered in 1924 by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in Taung, South Africa. Raymond Dart described it as a new species in the journal Nature in 1925.

The skull is in repository at the University of Witwatersrand.^[1]

History

In the early 20th century, workers at limestone quarries in southern Africa routinely uncovered fossils from the tufa formations they mined. Many were of extinct fauna, which included baboons and other primates, and the more complete or somehow more interesting fossils were kept as curios by the Europeans that managed operations.^[2]

In 1924, workers at the Buxton Limeworks near Taung, South Africa showed a fossilised 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.^[2]

Josephine Salmons was the first female student of Dart, an anatomist at the University of Witwatersrand. Salmons was permitted to take the fossilised skull and presented it to Dart, who also recognised it as a significant find. Dart asked the company to send any more interesting fossilised skulls that should be unearthed. When a consulting geologist named Robert Young paid a visit to the quarry office, he relieved the manager, A.E. Spiers, of a collection of fossilised primate skulls that had been gathered by a miner known as Mr. De Bruyn. Young sent all the skulls back to Dart.^[2] When Dart examined the contents of the crate, he found a fossilised endocast of a skull, showing the impression of a complex brain, and matched it to a fossilised skull of a juvenile primate, which had a shallow face and fairly small teeth.^[2] After a complete examination, he published the discovery in 1925, describing the new species of Australopithecus in the journal Nature. It was soon nicknamed the Taung Child.

The idea that the skull belonged to a new genus was identified by comparison with skulls of chimpanzees. The endocast of the Taung child was larger than a fully grown chimpanzee's. The forehead of the chimpanzee receded to form a heavy browridge and a jutting jaw; while the Taung child's forehead recedes, but leaves no browridge. The Taung child's foramen magnum (a void in the cranium where the spinal cord is continuous with the brain) is located beneath the cranium, showing that the creature stood upright.^[3]

The British scientific establishment was at the time enamored with the hoax Piltdown Man, which had a large brain and ape-like teeth – the exact opposite of the Taung Child – and Dart's interpretation was not appreciated for decades.^[4]

Criticism of the Dart's research

After Dart presented the fossil of Australopithecus africanus, he received substantial criticism from scientists. Arthur Keith, one of the most prominent anatomists to comment on the fossil, said:

"[Dart's] 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".^[5]

Solly Zuckerman carried out studies of the Australopithecines family. Zuckerman thought that Australopithecus was little more than an ape. Zuckerman and a four-member team worked on the issue in the 1950s. Zuckerman decided that these creatures had not walked on two legs and were not an intermediate form between humans and apes. The concluding report by Zuckerman read:

"For my own part, the anatomical basis for the claim that the Australopithecines walked and ran upright like man is so much more flimsy than the evidence which points to the conclusion that their gait was some variant of what one sees in subhuman Primates, that it remains unacceptable".^[6]

Dean Falk, a specialist in neuroanatomy, declared that the Taung skull belonged to a young monkey.

"In his 1975 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".

"Like humans, [apes and monkeys] go through stages as they grow up. In his analysis of Taung, Dart did not fully appreciate that infant apes have not had time to develop features of the skull, such as thickened eyebrow ridges or attachment areas for heavy neck muscles, that set adult apes apart from human. Apparently he did not carefully consider the possibility that Taung's rounded forehead or the inferred position of the spinal cord might be due to the immaturity of the apelike specimen rather than to its resemblance to humans".^[7]

John Reader said that "Dart drew bold conclusions from his unavoidably limited observations".^[8]

Description

Taung-1 front

Philip V. Tobias and the Taung Child.

The fossil consists of most of the face and mandible with teeth and, uniquely, a natural endocast of the braincase. It is estimated to be 2.5 million years old. Originally thought to have been a monkey or ape, Dart realised that the skull would have been positioned directly above the spine, indicating an upright posture. This is a trait seen in humans, but not other primates.

The Taung Child was originally thought to be about six years old because of the presence of deciduous teeth, but is now believed to have been 3–4 based on studies of rates of enamel deposition. It was a creature standing 3' 6" (105 cm) and weighing about 20–24 pounds (9–11 kg). It had a cranial capacity of 400–500 cc^[9] and lived mainly in a savanna habitat.

Examinations of the Taung Child fossil compared to that of an equivalent 9-year-old 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. However, intermediate species such as Homo ergaster/Homo erectus are thought to have gone through growth rates intermediate between modern humans and apes. This conclusion has mostly been based on the Turkana Boy fossil discovered in 1984.

In early 2006 it was announced that the Taung Child was probably killed by an eagle or similar large predatory bird. This conclusion was reached by noting similarities in the damage to the skull and eye sockets of the Taung Child with damage to the skulls of modern primates known to have been killed by eagles.^[10]

In popular culture

A hologram of the skull appeared on the cover of the Nov. 1985 issue of National Geographic, in one of the pioneering uses of holograms in mass-market publications (a smaller hologram of an eagle had appeared on an earlier issue).^[11]

Taung child – Recovering the missing parts of skull by Arc-Team, Antrocon NPO, Cicero Moraes, University of Padua

Taung child – Facial forensic reconstruction by Arc-Team, Antrocon NPO, Cicero Moraes, University of Padua

See also

• Selam (Australopithecus)
• List of human evolution fossils
• List of fossil sites

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Taung Child.

• Brain, C.K. Raymond Dart and our African Origins, in A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World, Laura Garwin and Tim Lincoln, eds.
• "Images of Taung 1". Retrieved 2006-07-13. 
• Maropeng – The Cradle of Humankind Official Website
• Downloadable 30 minute analysis by the BBC