“Taung was the opposite,” says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood. The hole in its skull for the spinal cord was located squarely at the bottom, suggesting a creature who had walked uprigh ...

He painstakingly removed a fossil skull from this material ... It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery site and its young age. Dart is portrayed as prescient in most ...

which became known as the Taung child skull. The paper’s author, an Australian-born anatomist called Raymond Dart, argued that the fossil was a new species of hominin called Australopithecus ...

A replica of the Laetoli footprints discovered in Laetoli, Tanzania; The original footprints were dated to 3.6 million years ago. | Momotarou2012, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 In the last ...

John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says Australopithecus, and the Taung skull specifically, combined three things in a way that no scientists had predicted.

Dart was examining a set of fossils that had been unearthed by miners near the town of Taung in South Africa when he found the skull of a “missing link” between ancient apes and humans.

It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery ... They were looking outside Africa for human origins and argued that the skull more likely belonged to a non-human primate.

It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery ... They were looking outside Africa for human origins and argued that the skull more likely belonged to a non-human primate.