Located only 20 or 30 miles from Pretoria, Johannesburg,
the other major city in the Gauteng Province of South Africa, houses a very
impressive fossil collection from Sterkfontein at the University of Witwatersrand.
The University boasts a long history of human evolutionary studies, home
to the discoverer of the famous Taung Child in the 1920s, Raymond Dart and
presently home to the current director of the Sterkfontein Research Unit,
Professor Philip Tobias. I was lucky enough to meet with Professor Tobias
and view the Taung Child myself. The Taung child was the first Australopithecus
fossil discovered and was meant with a very controversial reaction from the
scientific community. Many did not believe Raymond Dart's claim that the juvenile
fossil was a member of the human lineage, not the apes. It took the help
of Robert Broom and the discovery of a number of additional fossils, including
'Mrs. Ples', to convincingly place the Taung Child in lineage of humans.
|
|