Discoveries

[Spalea]

A young child australopithecus abducted by a giant eagles... By Mauricio Anton.

About this australopithecus : " The Taung Child (or Taung Baby) is the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus. It was discovered in 1924 by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in Taung, South Africa. Raymond Dart described it as a new species in the journal Nature in 1974.


The Taung skull is in repository at the University of Witwatersrand. Dean Falk, a specialist in brain evolution, has called it "the most important anthropological fossil of the twentieth century."

We did not evolve from modern apes, but we share a common ancestor with them. In other words, if we back the clock up a few million years, we will find an ape-like ancestor whose populations split, and different groups went down different evolutionary paths. One group evolved into us, and another group evolved into chimps. So we and chimps share a great, great, great…great grandparent who went extinct a few million years ago, but we did not evolve from chimps, monkeys, or modern apes. "

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