Australopithecus - History of Study

History of Study

The first australopithecine to be discovered and documented was a fossil of a three year old Australopithecus africanus which was discovered in a lime quarry by workers at Taung, South Africa. The specimen was studied by the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, who was then working at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who published his findings in Nature magazine in February 1925. Dart realised that the fossil contained a number of humanoid features, and so came to the conclusion that this was an early ancestor of humans.

Ten years later, he and the Scottish paleontologist Robert Broom, set about to search for more early hominin specimens, and at several sites they found further A. africanus remains as well as fossils of a species which Broom named Paranthropus (which would now be recognised as Paranthropus robustus). Initially, anthropologists were largely hostile to the idea that these discoveries were anything but apes, though this changed during the latter years of the 1940s.

The first australopithecine to be discovered in eastern Africa was a skull belonging to an Australopithecus boisei that was excavated in 1959 in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania by Mary Leakey. Since then, the Leakey family have continued to excavate the gorge, uncovering further evidence for australopithecines as well as for Homo habilis and Homo erectus.

Scientists have recently discovered a new australopithecine in South Africa. The fossils of "Australopithecus sediba", which lived 1.9 million years ago, were found in Malapa cave in South Africa. It is thought "Australopithecus africanus" probably gave rise to "Australopithecus sediba", which some scientists think possibly evolved into "Homo erectus".