The story of human evolution has emerged slowly over the century. The first significant discovery was that of the "Taung child" in 1925. Found in South Africa, the skull belonged to a child who ...

Dart quickly realized the significance of the finding, and by February 1925 had published an article in Nature identifying a new species: Australopithecus africanus. The 2.5-million-year-old “Taung ...

The international scientific community rebuffed this hypothesis. They were looking outside Africa for human origins and argued that the skull more likely belonged to a non-human primate. Dart was ...