The fossil skull that rocked the world – 100 years later scientists are grappling with the Taung find’s complex colonial legacy

Here’s how the story of the Taung Child is usually told:

In 1924 an Australian anthropologist and anatomist, Raymond Dart, acquired a block of calcified sediment from a limestone quarry in South Africa. He painstakingly removed a fossil skull from this material.

A few months later, on 7 February 1925, he published his description of what he argued was a new hominin species, Australopithecus africanus, in the journal Nature. It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery site and its young age.