Format: Paper presentations with discussion
Convenors:
Jackson Njau, Professor and President, The Eastern Association of Paleoanthropology & Paleontology (EAAPP), jknjau@iu.edu
Michael Westaway, University of Queensland, m.westaway@uq.edu.au
Beny Bol, Village Support Ltd, benybol@villagesupport.org.au
Dr Raymond Dart’s 1925 description of Australopithecus africanus marked a groundbreaking moment in palaeoanthropology, reshaping our understanding of human evolution. At a time when the Piltdown forgery dominated scientific discourse, Dart’s publication of the Taung child provided the first definitive evidence of early hominins in Africa, challenging the prevailing belief that human origins lay primarily in Europe or Asia. Dart, an Australian anatomist, revealed a striking blend of apelike and human traits, suggesting a more complex and diverse evolutionary pathway than previously imagined. This session explores the lasting impact of Dart’s findings, focusing on how they revolutionised our understanding of human origins, and the critical role African fossils play in shaping the narrative of our shared history. Presentations will reflect on the evolution of palaeoanthropological thought over the last century and the future directions of research in light of emerging ethical awareness. Emphasising the colonial legacies embedded in the discipline’s foundations, we invite contributions that critically examine these historical dimensions. The session will also address the transformative effects of the Taung discovery on hominin classification, biology, and palaeoenvironments, and how contemporary research can move towards more inclusive practices. We aim to foster a broader, more ethical understanding of palaeoanthropology, exploring how the field can decolonise research methodologies, promote Indigenous stewardship of heritage, and challenge ongoing historical injustices.
Papers:
Creating Opportunities for Children from the Africa to Queensland Diaspora by Connecting with the Ancient World of the Taung Child
Beny Aterdit Bol OAM, Managing Director of the Village Support Ltd, and former president of Queensland African Communities Council (QACC)
Denis Jato, Senior Research & Evaluation Officer at the Village Support Limited, PhD candidate at QUT
There has been significant increase in the number of Africans arriving in Australia, with 2022 statistics indicating 1.9% of the total Australian population. Children of African descent born in Australia grow up with little knowledge of their history and identity.
In addition to significant social trauma in their home countries, people of African origin have been subjected to racial abuse as they struggle to make a life in Australia. This treatment tends to re-ignite old wounds created by colonisation and slave trade that has been passed down through generations and still lingers around.
Very few students are given the opportunity to engage with universities, and their ambitions can be quite modest in a society where expectations are not always high. In this talk we outline a program between the African Village, University of Queensland and three high schools that uses the extraordinary Taung discovery as a vehicle to engage students in university life and learning. This project could also be instrumental to addressing issues associated with racial discrimination and racism suffered by young Africans in schools and workplaces.
The Taung Fossil and Initial Thinking Around its Evolutionary Context
Michael C. Westaway, Archaeology, Social Science, University of Queensland, Australia
In summing up on his consideration of the evolutionary context of Australopithecus africanus Raymond Dart (1925) wrote ‘Southern Africa, by providing a vast open country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water, together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human evolution’. I argue that his training in biology and geology at the University of Queensland, followed by study in the comparative anatomy of the brain at the University of Sydney, provided a unique skill set that was later supplemented by careful tuition in human anatomy in the UK. Training in early evolutionary biology in Brisbane and Sydney played an important role interpreting the meaning of the Taung fossil, and represents an important shift in the way early paleoanthropological research moved from pure comparative anatomy to a consideration of selective processes in evolutionary biology.
Hominin Colonialism: Reflecting on a Century Since the Discovery of Taung
Jackson K. Njau, Dept of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Since Raymond Dart’s 1925 publication of the Taung Child in Nature, his interpretation of this fossil—the first hominin discovered in Africa—has sparked ongoing scientific debate. His classification and naming of the Taung fossil as Australopithecus africanus, which he claimed as a ‘missing link’ in human evolution, sparked extensive research into human origins. However, Dart’s research ethics have been criticised, particularly his use of African human skeletons and living people as comparative data. This practice, emblematic of the broader scientific abuses of colonial powers in the early 20th century, highlights the exploitative nature of research that appropriated Indigenous cultures for Western scientific advancement. While such practices were unfortunately pervasive during the colonial era, it is essential to critically engage with the enduring consequences of these colonial legacies in the field. However, the discovery of Zinjanthropus boisei in Tanzania, 34 years later, shifted the focus of research from SA to Eastern Africa. This shift not only marginalised research grounded in Pan-African perspectives but also solidified Western dominance in African heritage. This presentation explores how colonialism stifled the growth of local paleoanthropological capacity (infrastructure, expertise, resources) with a focus on Eastern African hominin hot spots, following the discovery of Taung.
Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins
Christa Kuljian, Research Associate, WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Raymond Dart is most widely known for publishing his description in Nature of the Taung Child skull, which he named Australopithecus africanus, in February 1925, thereby making a pivotal contribution to the field of palaeoanthropology. This paper will explore several other aspects of Dart’s career, including the colonial practice in Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century of collecting human skeletons and cataloguing them into pure racial types (that we now know do not exist) based on physical characteristics. Dart started his own human skeleton collection in 1922 when he arrived at the Department of Anatomy at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1936, Dart led a Wits University expedition to the Kalahari to study the anatomy of the people there, as he thought it would provide a clue to understanding human evolution. Dart and his colleagues were involved in a range of disturbing anthropological practices and scientific racism that has had an ongoing legacy in the fields of anatomy, anthropology and palaeoanthropology. The paper will draw on research done in the Raymond Dart papers for my book titled Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins.
The Multilayered Influence of the Scala Naturae Organising Principle on the Interpretation of the Taung Fossil
T.J. Gundling, Professor of Anthropology, Dept of Community and Social Justice Studies, William Paterson University, Wayne, USA
This presentation reviews prior research arguing that the theoretical context in which fossil hominins were interpreted at the time of the discovery at Taung was grounded in the Western, pre-evolutionary organisational schema of a Chain of Being or Scala Naturae. This gradistic approach to phylogenetic reconstruction determined which species had crossed some semi-arbitrary anatomical or behavioural threshold and were therefore considered ‘human’.
It then narrows the lens of the Great Chain concept from interspecific classification to intraspecific analysis, most notably within Homo sapiens. Specifically, it examines how 19th century race science, and its predictable progeny, eugenics, were steeped in the belief that modern humans could be placed into discrete types based on a handful of traits and then ranked. Such traits were viewed as honest signals of much more fundamental qualities unique to different races. This mindset undoubtedly informed colonial attitudes towards indigenous populations of southern Africa and by extension disqualified any purported African hominin fossils as direct human ancestors from which all later species evolved. It was simultaneously inimical to the expectation that the more recent roots of Homo sapienswould be found in Africa.