The Taung Child is the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus. It was discovered in 1924 by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in Taung, South Africa. Raymond Dart described it as a new species in the journal Nature in 1925.
Taung Child
Taung-1 front
Phillip V. Tobias and the Taung Child
Robert Broom, a Scottish doctor who became a professional paleontologist in 1933 at 67, was a longtime supporter of Dart. Broom discovered fossils of Australopithecus that contributed to the acceptance of Dart's interpretation of the Taung child, as a transitional form between apes and anatomically modern humans.
Australopithecus africanus
Australopithecus africanus is an extinct species of australopithecine which lived between about 3.3 and 2.1 million years ago in the Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene of South Africa. The species has been recovered from Taung, Sterkfontein, Makapansgat, and Gladysvale. The first specimen, the Taung child, was described by anatomist Raymond Dart in 1924, and was the first early hominin found. However, its closer relations to humans than to other apes would not become widely accepted until the middle of the century because most had believed humans evolved outside of Africa. It is unclear how A. africanus relates to other hominins, being variously placed as ancestral to Homo and Paranthropus, to just Paranthropus, or to just P. robustus. The specimen "Little Foot" is the most completely preserved early hominin, with 90% of the skeleton intact, and the oldest South African australopith. However, it is controversially suggested that it and similar specimens be split off into "A. prometheus".
Australopithecus africanus
Cast of Taung child from the collection of the University of the Witwatersrand
Mrs. Ples at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, Pretoria
Reconstructed skull of Mrs. Ples at the Beijing Museum of Natural History