The centennial of the "Taung child" discovery in South Africa is bringing a re-evaluation of the science and its history.
Raymond Dart's 1925 publication of the first Australopithecus africanus ended up overturning paleoanthropology, but the colonial legacy and context live on.
On February 7, 1925, Raymond Dart, the Australian anthropologist and anatomist who made most of his career in South Africa, published a report in the journal Nature announcing the discovery of a new species of early human relative he named Australopithecus africanus. The skull of what was probably a three year old child had been found by quarry workers the year before in Taung, a small town in the north of South Africa.
Dart claimed that it was a transitional species between non-human apes and later humans, a contention that was immediately attacked by many of the leading experts of the day. For one thing, the idea that human origins were rooted in Africa, rather than Asia or even Europe, was anathema at the time. Leading scholars of human evolution were still in the throes of being fooled by the Piltdown Man hoax, and found it hard to believe that a true human ancestor would have such a small skull; at no more than 500 cubic centimeters, the Taung Child cranium was only about as big as that of an adult chimpanzee.
But Dart’s arguments, including evidence from the skull that Australopithecus africanus probably was bipedal and walked upright, eventually won scientists over. Since then, a number of other australopithecines have been discovered—including, of course, Australopithecus afarensis (“Lucy”) in Ethiopia—but anthropologists still argue about which of them, if any, are direct ancestors of the genus Homo.
It was that ongoing scientific argument that led me, one day in the summer of 2011, to have my own face to face encounter with the Taung Child. The journal Science had sent me to South Africa to cover the discovery of the latest australopithecine, Australopithecus sediba, by a team led by the American paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, now at the University of Witswatersrand (actually, the fossil was first spotted by Berger’s son, Matthew, although Science’s editors would not allow Matthew’s name on the papers describing the find when they were published in that journal.)
It came as no surprise to those who knew him that the media-savvy Berger was claiming Au. sediba was a direct human ancestor. No matter. During that trip I got to see the Taung Child in its vault at Wits, as the university is affectionately called; visit the cave where the complete fossil skeleton of an australopithecine known as “Little Foot” had been chiseled out of the breccia; and even meet former President Thabo Mbeki on a VIP excursion to Malapa Cave to see the site of Au. sediba’s discovery.
Last week, I also had the pleasure of sitting in on an online conference that took place in South Africa to mark the 100th anniversary of Dart’s publication in Nature (see announcement and speaker list above.) Probably just as importantly, the anniversary is also being marked by the publication of a special, open access issue of the South African Journal of Science entitled “The Taung Child then and now: Commemorating its centenary in a postcolonial age.” (The issue is available as a pdf and an ePub.)
As the title implies, and as the speakers at the meeting emphasized, a lot has changed in the past 100 years. Human evolution research is no longer the sole province of white men like Raymond Dart, apartheid is gone from South Africa, and an increasing number of Africans are taking their place in these scientific ranks. Women too now make up a much higher percentage of human evolution researchers, although there are still many gaps to be filled.
These issues are foreshadowed in an introductory article in the special issue, authored by Rebecca Ackermann of the University of Cape Town and three other colleagues. The authors write:
“Our decision to mark the Taung centenary by publishing this collection of articles in an open access South African journal, and to centre the voices of South African researchers, was a deliberate one. Too often, African palaeoanthropological heritage is the domain of international teams, with little meaningful collaboration from local African researchers – a phenomenon increasingly being recognised as ‘helicopter science’. The paucity of diverse Global South perspectives has done a disservice to the field, and has led to the perpetuation of colonial legacies and practices, while at the same time rendering much of what is going on invisible internationally, as it is not the lived experience of the researchers being centred. In this light, our goal is to celebrate the remarkable science that the discovery of A. africanus enabled, but also to probe disciplinary legacies viewed through a critical lens that challenges us to do science better.”
But it wasn’t just the fact that Raymond Dart was a white man that reflected the colonial legacy of South Africa and other nations on the continent, but his dedication to a view of humanity that represented white supremacy in full flower. In a fascinating article by Christa Kuljian, a science journalist affiliated with Wits, the author lays out detailed evidence for Dart’s role at the center of what we now call “race science”—a conviction by many anthropologists of the time that humans could be neatly categorized in racial terms using measurements ranging from skulls to the labia of African women.
Kuljian, who detailed some of her research about Dart and other race scientists in her 2016 book “Darwin’s Hunch,” also points out that Dart’s successor Philip Tobias continued this line of research for many decades, and defended Dart’s reputation nearly until the end of apartheid in the early 1990s.
(Kuljian’s paper starts off with the fascinating story of how Dart and others contributed to what she calls the “one man, one fossil” mythology of how human evolution research is done, which focuses on scientific heroism rather than the team effort behind almost all important discoveries. In the case of the Taung Child, the critical role of geologist Robert Young, who identified the chunks of breccia likely to hold fossil evidence, was long forgotten; similarly, how many can recall any of the names of the team that discovered “Lucy,” other than Don Johanson, who is often given sole credit for finding the fossils—a distortion of scientific history that Johanson himself, in my opinion, has done too little to correct.)
I highly recommend these new papers to those who like to take deep dives into human evolution research, and Christa Kuljian’s book for those interested in the historical context of the discovery of the Taung Child and its aftermath. Whatever Dart’s faults, there is little question that he helped to set human evolution studies on a very fruitful path, one that we continue to travel today and learn so much from.
To long-time and new readers of “Words for the Wise,” a message as well. As a reporter for Science, I spent 25 years covering human evolution, anthropology, archaeology, and related fields. While I have not been writing much about these subjects lately, I have kept up with the research and my passion for writing about it has not diminished. Watch for updates, as regular as possible, about the story of our species, and how—for better or worse—it came to be.
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