The fossil skull that rocked the world – 100 years later scientists are grappling with the Taung find’s complex colonial legacy

By Rebecca Ackermann, Professor, Department of Archaeology and Human Evolution Research Institute, University of Cape Town
Lauren Schroeder, Associate Professor in Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Toronto
Robyn Pickering, Senior lecturer, University of Cape Town

Here’s how the story of the Taung Child is usually told:

In 1924 an Australian anthropologist and anatomist, Raymond Dart, acquired a block of calcified sediment from a limestone quarry in South Africa. He painstakingly removed a fossil skull from this material.

A year later, on 7 February 1925, he published his description of what he argued was a new hominin species, Australopithecus africanus, in the journal Nature.…

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