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This tiny fossilized skull belonged to a 3-year-old child that lived around 2.8 million years ago! Today we’re celebrating the 100th anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of the Taung Child, Australopithecus africanus. #onthisday

This important fossil confirmed Africa as the birthplace of humanity and revolutionized our understanding of evolution. ⁠

The Taung Child skull was discovered in 1924 by workers at a South African rock quarry who had blasted it out of the limestone quarry wall. Josephine Salmons, a medical student at the University of the Witwatersrand saw the skull on a friend’s mantelpiece and brought to her professor, Raymond Dart.⁠

Dart recognized this was something special and spent over two months scraping away the surrounding limestone with knitting needles. He described the fossil in the journal Nature on February 7, 1925, giving it the species name Australopithecus africanus, which means the "southern ape from Africa."⁠

This amazing fossil also had what's called an endocast of the brain, which you can see here. An endocast is a fossil impression of the inside of a hollow object, like a skull. This captured the shape and size of the Taung Child's brain, giving Dart an important clue that this was a human relative.⁠

⁠Photos 3,4 and 6 form part of the Wits University Archives and are published with kind permission of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa.⁠ We're grateful to them for allowing us to share these wonderful photos! ⁠