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I was aware of a sense of history for, by the sheerest good luck, I had been given the opportunity to provide what would probably be the ultimate answer in the comparatively modern study of the evolution of man.

What particularly impressed Dart were the humanlike features of the Taung specimen: its high, domed forehead; its lack of eyebrow ridges; its large and rounded eye sockets; its lightly built lower jaw; the small profile of its teeth. Instead of protruding like that of an ape, the face had a flatter appearance. Its age, he calculated, on the basis of its teeth structure, was about the same as a human at a similar stage of development—some six years. Its brain, however, appeared to be relatively small. Dart estimated the skull capacity to be 520 cubic centimetres, bigger than a chimpanzee’s but smaller than a gorilla’s. He was struck in particular by the position of the foramen magnum, the aperture through which the spinal cord leaves the cranium and enters the spinal column: It was situated at the base of the skull rather than towards the rear, as in the case of quadrupedal apes. This could only mean one thing, Dart surmised: The Taung child must have walked upright, like humans.

Excited by these findings, Dart opened his article for Nature with the bold claim that the Taung specimen represented ‘an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man’—‘a man-like ape’, possessing ‘humanoid’ characteristics. To mark its status, he proposed a new genus and species for it: Australopithecus africanus; austral from the Latin, meaning ‘southern’; pithecus, of Greek origin, meaning ‘monkey’ or ‘ape’.

Dart speculated freely about its place in the history of human evolution. Because the Taung child had walked upright on two feet, he said, its hands had been freed to assume ‘a higher evolutionary role’. It was able to carry out ‘more elaborate, purposeful, and skilled movements’ than apes, using its hands as ‘organs of offence and defence’ and for making tools. Its brain structure not only enabled it to process sight, sound and touch more thoroughly than any ape but indicated that it was within reach of the ability to acquire language.

Dart wrote about the attributes of the new species not in sober scientific prose but with breathless enthusiasm:

They possessed to a degree unappreciated by the living anthropoids the use of their hands and ears and the consequent faculty of associating with the colour, form, and general appearance of objects, their weight, texture, resilience and flexibility, as well as the significance of sounds emitted by them. In other words, their eyes saw, their ears heard, and their hands handled objects with great meaning and to fuller purpose than the corresponding organs in recent apes. They had laid down the foundations of that discriminative knowledge of the appearance, feeling, and sound of things that was a necessary milestone in the acquisition of articulate speech.

He speculated, too, about the location where it had been found. Taung, he noted, was on the fringe of the Kalahari Desert. It was some 2,000 miles distant from the luxuriant tropical forests of central Africa—the natural habitat of ape populations. In central Africa, he wrote, ‘Nature was supplying with profligate and lavish hand an easy and sluggish solution, by adaptive specialization, of the problem of existence’. But anthropoid groups venturing into southern Africa, where conditions were harsher, had been obliged to develop new techniques. ‘For the production of man a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect—a more open veldt country where competition was keener between swiftness and stealth, and where adroitness of thinking and movement played a preponderating role in the preservation of the species’.

He recalled how Darwin had predicted that Africa would prove to be the cradle of humankind. ‘In my opinion’, he wrote, ‘Southern