Australopithecus africanus The Man-Ape of South Africa

Abstract

TOWARDS the close of 1924, Miss Josephine -*- Salmons, student demonstrator of anatomy in the University of the Witwatersrand, brought to me the fossilised skull of a cercopithecid monkey which, through her instrumentality, was very generously loaned to the Department for description by its owner, Mr. E. G. Izod, of the Rand Mines Limited. I learned that this valuable fossil had been blasted out of the limestone cliff formation-at a vertical depth of 50 feet and a horizontal depth of 200 feet-at Taungs, which lies 80 miles north of Kimberley on the main line to Rhodesia, in Bechuanaland, by operatives of the Northern Lime Company. Important stratigraphical evidence has been forthcoming recently from this district concerning the succession of stone ages in South Africa (Neville Jones, Jour. Roy. Anthrop. Inst., 1920), and the feeling was entertained that this lime deposit, like that of Broken Hill in Rhodesia, might contain fossil remains of primitive man.