Overberg Geoscientists Group
4,5 Mya
First Pre-Humans
In 1924 a fossil skull was found in a limestone quarry near the town of Taung in the North West province of South Africa. It came to the notice of Raymond Dart at Wits University. Only forty days after he first saw the fossil, Dart completed a paper that named the species of Australopithecus africanus, the "southern ape from Africa", and described it as "an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man". The paper appeared in the 7 February 1925 issue of the journal Nature. The fossil was soon nicknamed the Taung Child.
It was not immediately accepted as a transitional form. Robert Broom, a Scottish palaeontologist, came to South Africa, and decided it was the case, and went on to discover more Australopithecus fossils, mainly of adults. However, it was not until the late 1940s that, with the additional support of prominent British anthropologist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark it was accepted by the wider scientific community.
Skull of the 3-year-old “Taung Child”. The first fossil of Australopithecus africanus.
In 1959 more fossils of the Australopithecus were found in East Africa at the famous Olduvai Gorge site, by the Leakey family.
These included the Laetoli footprints that proved that Australopithecus was bipedal and walked on two legs.
The numerous fossils from East and South Africa have proven that Australopithecines were the progenitors of Hominids. Some of these pre-date the Taung child, including “Lucy” found in Ethiopia Australopithecus afarensis
Later during excavations at the ‘Cradle of Mankind’ north west of Johannesburg, More fossils of later Australopithecines were found
These included ‘Little Foot’ A africanus and a later member, Australopithecus sediba.
These were both found in the ‘Cradle of Mankind’ Reserve, a very important region for the investigations into the history of Man.
With all the fossils from mainly East and South Africa, it is very difficult to establish exact relationships between fossils. This is compounded by the fact that evolution is a continuous process, and step by step differences are difficult to define. Thus, there have been many changes and disparities in the actual naming of species within the Australopithecus family.
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It is thought that within the Australopithecines there lies an ancestor to the subsequent Homo Genus that leads to Homo sapiens. But exactly which is not definitively known.
Further reading
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Lewin, Roger (1999). "The Australopithecines". Human Evolution: An Illustrated Introduction. Blackwell Science. pp. 112–113. ISBN 0632043091.
David A. Raichlen; Adam D. Gordon; William E. H. Harcourt-Smith; Adam D. Foster; Wm. Randall Haas Jr (2010). "Laetoli Footprints Preserve Earliest Direct Evidence of Human-Like Bipedal Biomechanics". PLOS ONE. 5
Lewin, Roger (1997). Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geggel, Laura (11 December 2018). "'Miracle' Excavation of 'Little Foot' Skeleton Reveals Mysterious Human Relative". Live Science.
Berger, L. R.; de Ruiter, D. J.; Churchill, S. E.; Schmid, P.; Carlson, K. J.; Dirks, P. H. G. M.; Kibii, J. M. (2010). "Australopithecus sediba: a new species of Homo-like australopith from South Africa". Science. 328