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'Tobias PV, 2005: Eighty Years After the Discovery of the Taung Skull Revolutionised Paleoanthropology. Anthropologie (Brno) 43, 2-3: 121-128'. |
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| Abstract | | When the Taung child's skull was found in 1924, it was the first-discovered specimen of Australopithecus. Raymond Dart, who revealed it to the world in 1925, faced much opposition from those many scientists who cherished other views on the pattern of human evolution. The dangers of the time factor being employed to support or reject Dart's claims for the Taung child are reviewed and examples are cited. An account is given of subsequent developments, such as the finding of more South African sites containing the fossil apemen; the geographical extension of knowledge about hominid-bearing sites to East, Central and North Africa; the impact of the critical new field of molecular evolution and its repercussions on the dating of the past history of the hominids; the emergence of taphonomy; the role of cladistics; and the problems of classifying fossils and making new genera and species, perhaps too many of them! The eighty years from 1925 to 2005 have seen the establishment and maturation of an essentially new scientific discipline. It is reasonable to claim that the past century has opened up knowledge of Man's Place in Nature, as Thomas Huxley could never have dreamed. | | | | Keywords | | Hominids - Fossils - Molecules - Dating | | |
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