Hi friends,

This week we’re celebrating.

On February 3, 1925, news broke that a startling fossil had been uncovered in a South African mine. With a somewhat human-like face but the small brain of a chimpanzee, the juvenile skull was proposed as an ancestor intermediate between humans and apes.

Named Australopithecus africanus—from Australis, Latin for southern, and pithēkos, Greek for ape—the “southern ape from Africa” is better known by its nickname, the Taung Child, for the nearby village of Taungs. Debated for decades, this controversial fossil ultimately landed in the human family tree and shaped our understanding of our origins in the process.

So this February marks one hundred years of Taung—the cenTaungary if you will. The extraordinary milestone encompasses more than this singular fossil because it means 100 years of the genus Australopithecus—now recognized as a vital step in human evolution. Let’s take a look back at Taung’s story, shall we?

Incredible pun courtesy of Tarquin Holmes.

Taung Then

For two cents, you could read about the “Fossilized Skull that May Be That of Missing Link” in the New York Times the day after the news broke in South Africa. It sat above the fold, between news of President Coolidge reaching a compensation deal for WWI and a weather report declaring “Unsettled today.”

The excitement over the fossil expressed in these early announcements would be short-lived. As scientists increasingly dismissed Taung in the following months, it became relegated to more distant sections of the family tree, closer to chimpanzees and gorillas. It would be another two decades before the critics subsided and it was widely accepted as a human ancestor. I wrote about this in a recent article for National Geographic on how we almost missed the “missing link.” (Though it’s worth mentioning there are no missing links - an outdated concept that implies a far too linear path).

The list of criticisms was long. For starters, the name was atrocious—mixing Latin and Greek in a fusion that was difficult to say. One scientist proposed the name be changed to “Dartians” after the scientist who described the fossil (this never took), while a playwright used the trick of pronouncing it to the rhythm of “those-who-do-not-seek-us.” The combination of ape-like and human-like features also seemed odd; particularly the small brain that indicated our ancestors stood upright before evolving big brains. Even the geologic age was questioned; how could this be an ancestor if no one knew how old it was?

But it was the fossil’s location that drew the most controversy. Taung suggested that human evolution had unfolded in Africa, a startling find during a time of immense scientific racism when the search for human origins was focused on Europe and Asia.

Taung Now

Today, Taung sits smugly in the vault at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It has had a stunning comeback and is now one of the most important discoveries in paleoanthropology. We’re still learning about the skull, which is probably around 2.8 million years old and belonged to a child who was only about 3 years old when it died.

The fossil’s story isn’t all celebration and triumph, however, as it is closely entwined with the products of colonialism and scientific racism. But by directing scientists’ attention to Africa as the birthplace of humankind, its legacy looms large.

And in the last hundred years, the genus Australopithecus has grown exponentially, with at least five more species added since the original A. africanus. During the century of studying the southern ape, we’ve learned that these upright-walking relatives preceded our genus, Homo, used stone tools, ate a varied diet, and lived across eastern and southern Africa. Given the place of Australopithecus in the human story, it’s difficult to imagine a more significant centenary.

A few resources if you’d like to spend more time with Taung:

• A blog post on how a local newspaper scooped Nature on the discovery.

• A lecture by the scientist who described the fossils, from the Leakey Foundation.

• Paleoanthropologist Zerey Alemseged recently wrote an excellent review on Australopithecus.

Bonus Tidbit: Though Taung was described in a short, summary article, the describer also wrote a 250-page manuscript that has never been published. After digging it up in the archives, some colleagues and I are working with Wits to make it accessible soon. Keep an eye out!

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite 1920s Taung illustrations: