Out of Africa: celebrating 100 years of human-origins research
A landmark study reporting the discovery of Australopithecus africanus one century ago put the African continent at the centre of the story of humanity
The skull and braincast of the first Australopithecus africanus fossil, known as the Taung Child.Credit: Patrick Landmann/Science Photo Library
On 7 February 1925, Nature published an article about a curious fossil unearthed in South Africa1. ‘Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa’ had been sent in by Australian palaeoanthropologist Raymond Dart, who was then at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In his memoirs, Adventures with the Missing Link (1959), Dart notes that he was dressing for a wedding when he was distracted by the delivery of two large boxes of rocks, containing the face of Australopithecus and the braincast (known as an endocast) — an internal cast of the braincase formed from sediment — that fitted into the skull, like a ball in a baseball pitcher’s mitt.
The specimens’ site of origin — a lime-works and adjacent farmland in Taung, South Africa — was already known as a source of monkey fossils. A humanlike skull2 had also been found in 1921 at a mine near Broken Hill in what is now Kabwe, Zambia. In The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin had predicted that the roots of the human lineage lay in Africa. Although Australopithecus had its antecedents, Dart’s discovery was the start of a century-long journey of discovery that has confirmed Darwin’s prediction.
Nature, together with Nature Africa, Nature Communications and Nature Ecology and Evolution, is publishing two collections to commemorate this anniversary. The first includes 100 papers that charted this journey and reveal the part that this journal has played in documenting it. The second delves into the field of palaeoanthropology from the perspective of African scientists today.
The skull that commanded Dart’s attention was intermediate in form to those found before. Although that of a non-human ape, the skull clearly had humanlike characteristics, too, as anthropologist Dean Falk at Florida State University in Tallahassee describes in an Essay in this issue. The foramen magnum — the hole through which the spinal cord enters the skull — was underneath, rather than towards the back of, the skull, indicating that its owner had walked upright. The shape of the face and endocast was much more humanlike than apelike.
The jaw, too, looked more human than did that of Eoanthropus dawsoni, or Piltdown Man, a supposed ‘missing link’ between humans and other apes from Piltdown village, UK, described in 1912. Dart surmised that Australopithecus adults would have had a brain capacity similar to that of a gorilla. However, the skull was clearly that of a small child. Dart concluded that the fossil vindicated Darwin’s prediction of an African human origin.
Trenchant criticism came thick and fast. The London-based grandees of anthropology noted that the juveniles of humans and other apes looked similar, so Australopithecus could just as easily have been a non-human ape. They might also have been irked by Dart’s comments about the humanlike jaw of Australopithecus. In those days, it was thought that the large brain of humans evolved before the humanlike jaw and the rest of the skeleton. An upright ape with a small brain and humanlike jaw, therefore, went against the grain.
It would be decades before Piltdown Man was exposed as a hoax, a mash-up of a modern human skull and an orang-utan jaw, and Australopithecus was finally accepted as being closer to humans than to other apes. Meanwhile, physician-palaeontologist Robert Broom had started unearthing further Australopithecus fossils, showing that Dart’s specimen was not a fluke. And so, the course was set.
Eventually the focus of human-origins research moved from southern to East Africa and the name of Louis Leakey began to appear in the scientific record, although in those days of less-thorough sub-editing, he is listed in his first Nature paper ‘Stone Age Man in Kenya Colony’ as ‘Leaky’3.
Leakey, the son of a missionary who had come to Kenya to preach to the Kikuyu communities, established a fossil-hunting dynasty, although it was his second wife, Mary (née Nicol), who discovered their breakthrough fossil4, then named Zinjanthropus boisei (Nutcracker Man), in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, in 1959.
Nature became Leakey’s field diary. In the early 1990s, John Maddox, the journal’s then editor-in-chief, explained (in the presence of this editorial’s writer) to Leakey’s son Richard — another distinguished palaeontologist — that all papers in Nature were refereed except, historically, “those from [astronomer] Fred Hoyle and your dad”. Richard was visiting the journal’s London offices and commented on a Nature paper describing a remarkable fossil from Ethiopia, of a species then called Australopithecus ramidus5. He said that his wife, palaeoanthropologist Meave Leakey (née Epps), had equally exciting finds to report. Nature subsequently published her paper, too, on a four-million-year-old hominin species from Kenya6.
Ethiopia was by then on the palaeoanthropological map. Other countries in Africa would soon join it, with key fossils found in Chad7, Malawi8 and Morocco9. And Nature was there to document every new bone and tooth. Nowadays, West Africa is in the frame for new and exciting discoveries.
The past, as they say, is a different country, and so it was for 1925. Nature back then makes for often grim reading — paternalistic, male-dominated, imperialist, colonialist and, at times, nakedly racist. Had Dart’s paper been submitted today, it would at the very least have included the names of several others, notably, Josephine Salmons, a student demonstrator of anatomy at the same university as Dart, who brought the fossil to his attention.
Although things have changed, the field of palaeoanthropology10 has been slow to recognize the contributions of the many women, including Salmons, and African scholars who made key discoveries. One such researcher was Kamoya Kimeu, one of the greatest observers of human origins, who died in 2022. His successors are, increasingly, leading research today. The collections aim to celebrate all those who contributed to humanity’s evolving understanding of this part of the human story. The people might have changed, but Africa remains the heart of human origins.
Nature 638, 7-8 (2025)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00282-1
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:furtherReadingSection
