Taung, a village in the North West Province in South Africa, made world headlines when an Australian anthropologist, Professor Raymond Dart, found a two million year old skull here in 1924. Professor Dart named it the Taung skull, after the region. The little skull is that of a child of about 3 years old, was classified as Australopithecus africanus, one of the earliest hominids that lived in southern Africa.
Taung Heritage
Early humans and pre-humans sought shelter In caves, frequently in limestone caverns. When they died their remains were incorporated into the eroded cave breccia, a kind of limestone conglomerate. Modern humans mining these same caves for limestone many years later found heaps of strange bones, but took little notice until, slowly, the fossil finds came to the attention of the scientific community.
In 1924, Professor Raymond Dart became the first person to correctly identify a skull (complete with milk teeth and a large puncture mark in the cranium) found in the Buxton limeworks near Taung (North West Province) as the fossil remains of a small child. What had killed it?
Dr Lee Berger seems to have solved the world's oldest murder mystery: the area is littered with the bones of monkeys and other small creatures, probably carried there by eagles to devour at their nesting sites. Just imagine the parents' horror when a giant bird swooped down on the savanna around three million years ago and carried off their precious offspring.
The first major hominid fossil found in Africa was identified by Professor Raymond Dart, way back in 1924. Dart was an Australian who was wo...