The Taung Child at 100: Decolonizing the Origins of Paleoanthropology

Revisiting One of the Most Iconic Fossils Through a Postcolonial Lens

A Fossil That Changed Everything

In 1924, a small, fossilized skull was unearthed from a limestone quarry in South Africa. The skull belonged to a juvenile hominin—a species previously unknown to science. Raymond Dart, an ambitious anatomist, carefully extracted it from the matrix and, in a 1925 Nature¹ paper, named it Australopithecus africanus, or "the …