In spite of its inauspicious discovery, after the skull was reassembled, Mrs. Ples became the most complete australopithecine skull ever found, dating back 2.35 million years. In 1959, an ...

When anthropologist Raymond Dart revealed an australopithecine skull called the “Taung child” from South Africa in 1924, for example, other experts insisted that the fossil didn’t have ...

he found a fossilized mold of a brain and a matching child’s skull partially buried in stone. Dart quickly realized the significance of the finding, and by February 1925 had published an article in ...

Researchers believe that members of the human family - hominids - and African apes once had a common ancestor, perhaps as recently as 5 to 10 million years ago. At some stage the hominids split ...

The first example of Australopithecus was found in 1925 in a limestone cave near Taung, in South Africa, by the anthropologist Raymond Dart. He found the skull of a six year old creature with an ...

These are skull casts from human evolution. Left to right: Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert!

Found in South Africa, the skull belonged to a child who was at a stage of development of a present-day six year old. (Early hominids, such as the Australopithecines, grew at a faster rate than ...

Historian Christa Kuljian and paleoanthropologist Dipuo Kgotleng talk to The Conversation Weekly podcast about the ...