One hundred years ago, a paper was published in the journal Nature that would radically shift our understandings of the origins of humanity. It described a fossil, found in a lime mine in Taung in South Africa, 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 africanus. It was the first evidence that humanity originated in Africa.
