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How Australopithecus provided insight into human evolution

In 1925, a Nature paper reported an African fossil of a previously unknown genus called Australopithecus. This finding revolutionized ideas about early human evolution after human ancestors and apes split on the evolutionary tree.
  1. Dean Falk

    1. Dean Falk is in the Department of Anthropology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32310, USA, and is also at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Australian-born Raymond Dart had barely started his job as chair of the anatomy department of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, when he made a momentous discovery. Using his wife’s knitting needles, he painstakingly extracted a fossil (Fig. 1) from a chunk of rock found in Taungs (now known as Taung), South Africa. As he recalled1, “the rock parted … What emerged was a baby’s face, an infant with a full set of milk teeth … I doubt if there was any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my ‘Taungs baby’ on that Christmas of 1924.” Better yet, the fossil fitted neatly with another type of fossil, called an endocast, formed from sediments accumulated inside the skull. The endocast reflects brain-surface details stamped on the braincase’s inner walls. These fossils revealed a combination of ape-like and human-like features never previously reported together.

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Nature 575, 41-42 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02839-3

References

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