by Lydia Pyne
The explanatory power of a poem like this is immense, and its arguments and ideas demonstrate that there is more to the narrative of the fossil than what its morphometric measurements might indicate. The epic saga concludes—leaving us with the prose of heroic greatness.
Other types of stories about the fossil came to Dart, many of them completely unexpected. One of the more unusual was a very peculiar young adult novella, The Fantasy of the Missing Link, sent to him anonymously by a fan. The manuscript, which most likely dates from the mid-1930s, is signed “A Loyalist,” its text championing Dart and the Taung Child. Set in Taung itself, the story opens with a miner, Ginger, grumbling about the fossils in the rock. “’Ere’s another of them blinkin’ old monkey fossils, turned up again, Joe—about the umpteenth this year, I reckon.” He continues, “There must ’ave been a bloomin’ regime of ’em ’ere some time or other, a regular monkey’s harem.”
A bit tangled and stilted, and more than a little confusing, The Fantasy of the Missing Link nevertheless gives us a very clear sense that the Taung Child was quickly working its way into the popular vernacular. The question of the fossil’s place in the Great Chain—a human ancestor or just a “bloomin’ monkey”—is crucial to the unfolding of the story. Joe Chambers, an educated miner, brings the fossil to the attention of Dr. Daye, who in turn comes out to the Buxton Limeworks Museum. Dr. Daye’s and Joe’s monologues in the story serve as asides for slipping in science to the audience, as the speeches are peppered with Darwin, evolution, and the nature of family trees.
Interestingly, The Fantasy of the Missing Link takes on evolution and Darwin as socially problematic, pitting evolution against religion, through Ginger, a gruff miner. Ginger is reticent to accept a Darwinian perspective of evolution: “So ’elp me Gaud, Joe, if you say again that I’m like that damned blasted old monkey fossil, I’ll slash you acrost the face with this,” he says, brandishing a pickax. “I’ll make such a mess of your face, that yer own mother won’t know you!” Ginger describes the Bible stories, like the Garden of Eden, as the only origin story he is interested in. (At the end of the book, when the recovered fossil is to be sent to England for further study, Dart crossed out the author’s mention of Professor Elliot Smith and Sir Arthur Keith and penned in the names Professor Elland Swift and Sir Andrew Kelly—not, perhaps, the most subtle of aliases.)24 Each part of the Taung Child’s story—from discovery to location to Darwinian debates—is present within The Fantasy. The story finishes with the origin question—Darwin versus religion—juxtaposed and unresolved. Inherit the Wind the fan’s novella is not, but its themes and sentiments certainly overlap.
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In the 1940s, Dart began examining other bone and artifact assemblages collected by a local South African schoolteacher, Wilfred Eitzman, from several sites—like Sterkfontein and Makapansgat—near Taung. Both of these sites were rich in fossilized cores from antelope horns and shaped stone tools, raising the questions of who created these tools and for what purpose. Dart studied both assemblages several times and concluded that the fossilized bones and stone tools from the sites were created by the Taung Child’s species and that these australopithecines were “predatory ape-men” bludgeoning their way across the landscape. He called this complex of stone and bone technology the “Osteodontokeratic Culture” (ODK) and published numerous articles arguing complex sequences and timelines of particular tools. In ODK culture, Taung and his ape-men were the hunters—the dominators—of the landscape.
Where Dart had imagined a violent, bloodthirsty, bone-club-wielding set of human ancestors, others in the scientific community (such as Dr. Wilfrid Le Gros Clark) argued that Dart’s ODK culture pushed the limits of scientific evidence and interpretation. Le Gros Clark, himself a supporter of the Taung Child as an ancestor, argued that Dart’s ODK depended primarily on a lack of alternative hypotheses for the scientific community to evaluate. (In other words, what would account for the accumulation of bones if not for the Taung Child’s hominin species?) What Dart’s hypothesis did, however, was help to usher in new fields of study within archaeology and paleoanthropology—fields of study, like taphonomy, that looked at how soils and bones and rocks accumulated in caves such as Makapansgat. These new studies, by researchers like Dr. Sherwood Washborn and Dr. Charles Brain, determined that natural causes accounted for the bones’ accumulation. Brain’s studies took this budding field of taphonomy one step further away from ODK-like interpretations by matching leopard teeth to puncture marks in a recovered australopithecine skull from another South African fossil site, Swartkrans. These tooth punctures, along with other findings, illustrated that hominins were vulnerable in the landscape—the hunter was now interpreted as the hunted.
In the public imagination, however, the idea of a savage human ancestry caught fire, thanks to Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis, published in 1961, which argued humans were descendants of a bloodthirsty, weapon-welding predatory ancestor. African Genesis contained several direct references to Dart and his writing, and Ardrey posited that aggression—as would be expected in ODK culture—was the best model for understanding the barbarity of a killer-ape human ancestry. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel,” written in 1948, a year after Dart’s first publication on ODK, served as the basis for the femur-wielding furry ancestors in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The interpretation of the Taung Child’s species became imbued with meaning and morality. These themes became deeply entrenched in the public’s mind and were long associated with fossils like Taung, however much science pointed to a hominin very much at the mercy of its environment.25
In addition to the cultural milieu that swept around the fossil, the public also came to know the Taung Child through the fossil’s museum life as dioramas present viewers with a story about extinct species. (Recall that the poses, faces, and arrangement of Neanderthals in the 1930s dioramas in the Field Museum ensured that viewers came away with a story that Neanderthals were primitive savages.) A reconstruction of a fossil provides a visual dimensionality of muscle, skin, hair, and movement that imbues a sense of “realness” to a fossil that a mere description, however detailed, simply cannot match.
One of the most interesting dioramas of the Taung Child was constructed in the Ditsong Museum in Pretoria, South Africa. The dioramas, built in the late 1960s, provided visitors for fifty years with explicit and implicit stories of human evolution building on South Africa’s immense australopithecine fossil records. Some of the dioramas were small scenes with toy-sized hominins, while other dioramas showed life-sized scenes as museum visitors wandered through the South African environment of three million years ago. (In 2013 the dioramas were closed to the public for cleaning, restoration, and reworking.) How we think about the australopithecines and how the fossil species interacted with their environment has changed a great deal since the dioramas were first built. If the dioramas are opened to the public again, these changing interpretations of the fossil record—the hunter? the hunted?—ought to be reflected in the stories they tell museum visitors.26
The same paleoanthropology field school that introduced me to the Taung Child introduced me to these fantastical dioramas at the Ditsong, then called the Transvaal Museum. My favorite diorama was one on the second floor, where a stuffed leopard dragged an adult australopithecine off to its lair, with the australopithecine skull lodged firmly in its mouth—blood, rather macabrely, dripping out of the cranial tooth punctures. The entire scene was completely and fantastically over-the-top. In another corner, a leopard perched in a tree and chewed on a juvenile australopith with hominin body limbs accumulating below the branches. A different section of the room showcased a set of four australopithecines with the story of a nuclear family: Mom and Dad playing with their kids, while keeping a watchful eye on the predatory raptors perched above them. A small, furry moppet, labeled “Taung Child,” toddled after his other family members. Other scenes highlighted early tool use, as adult hominins brandish clubs. And a small
in-wall diorama showed a young adult australopithecine stretching, greeting the morning, as others begin to awaken against a sun-kissed African horizon.
Reconstruction of the Taung Child. Ditsong Museum, Johannesburg, 2013. (Justin Adams)
These dioramas tell several stories—early hominins were no match for their environment, an easy target in the South African paleoenvironment. The dioramas fold in then current scientific research, as the leopard-with-skull exhibit speaks directly to Dr. Brain’s work with cave taphonomy. The australopithecine nuclear family has immediate appeal, ascribing humanlike traits to this scene, as the viewer imagines adults protecting and playing with their offspring. These stories help allow for agency within the australopithecine community. In the broader context of human evolution, they make the australopithecines more like us, modern humans. They create sympathy and empathy with the species, because we recognize ourselves in these familiar scenes. Just as the brandishing club is a clear cultural motif, courtesy of Stanley Kubrick, dioramas allow human ancestors narrative space outside of a strict scientific circumstance.
Putting a face on the Taung Child began considerably early in the fossil’s life. During Robert Broom’s 1925 visit, Broom sketched an aged Taung Child in profile. He gave the adult Taung Child a very thick set of eyebrows, full apelike facial features, chimplike tufts of hair. He also gave it a bit of a quizzical expression. Dart kept another framed pen-and-ink sketch of the Child in his office at the university, one that showed it as a young, impish, Puck-like sprite of a hominid with a toothy grin.
Artistic representations of the fossil—whether through cartoon sketches or museum dioramas—take a static object and give it a face and body, thus allowing for more “understanding” through its art than if we were simply to read a descriptive placard about the fossil. Though the Ditsong scenes are only one example, the afterlife of the Taung Child is expressed through dioramas in a multitude of museums in a plethora of contexts—some better, some worse, but all tell audiences some story about the fossil.27
Where portraiture and photographs of the Taung Child offer an official, even formal, lens for the intersection of art and science, other artistic media became a way for audiences to meet the Taung Child fossil. Life of Bone was such an exhibit. Shown in Johannesburg at the Origins Centre in May 2011, it was an incredible success. The exhibit (and its accompanying book) highlighted the juxtaposition of art and science as envisioned by three South African artists—Joni Brenner, Gerhard Marx, and Karel Nel. As the artists describe it, their work draws directly and indirectly from human and fossil bones and shows “how bones intersect issues of human origin, evolution, deep time, lineage, ancestry, and belonging.”28 Their work also draws heavily on South Africa’s history.
Brenner’s work with watercolors for the exhibit featured paintings of the Taung Child from all angles in a variety of dark, muted reds and blacks. In some pieces, drops of paint ran across part of the Taung skull, lending Brenner’s unique voice to the Taung Child story. “Conversations, which often took place in the presence of skeletal remains and the casts of hominin fossils, reflected on ways of knowing, mapping and telling; on things we can and cannot know about our histories; and on the natural and social forces that have an impact on how we understand these material remains and ourselves,” Brenner explains.29
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In 2009, the University of the Witwatersrand Philip V. Tobias Fossil Primate and Hominid Laboratory inducted a curious artifact into its fossil vault as part of the Taung Child legacy. In 1925, after the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, Dart had a small wooden box made to store the Taung Child fossil. Stained a medium dark brown, the only artistic details on the box are the delicate floral tendrils on the brass latch. The nicks and scratches on the outside speak to years of handling and transport. The box housed the three parts of the Taung Child fossil: the bony part of the face, a jaw, and the endocast of the brain. In August 1931, during Dart’s visit to London, his wife, Dora, accidently left the fossil—allegedly in the wooden box—in a taxi in London. Dart relished telling the story of the shocked taxi driver opening the box, finding the fossil skull inside, and promptly turning it over to the London police. The police, in their own stunned turn, reunited the fossil with Dora the following morning.
In more recent decades, showing the fossil with the box was simply de rigueur as the box and the fossil have come to share so much history. When Professor Philip Tobias, himself one of Dart’s students, showed the fossil to different groups, pulling it out of its box was part of the experience of seeing the Taung Child. Dr. Kristi Lewton, a physical anthropologist, recalled seeing the box as part of Dr. Tobias’s demo. “I was struck by the juxtaposition of the figurative place of the Taung Child as one of the most important fossil discoveries in paleoanthropology, with its literal place—stored in a modest wooden box in a locked vault that was essentially a closet. At the time I thought, ‘Who knew this incredible discovery just sits in a closet?!’”30
After decades in the wooden box, the fossil was given a new acrylic box. When this was announced, media in Johannesburg turned up at the laboratory to witness the event. The retired box was given a specimen number in the Hominid Vault corresponding to Taung 1, the specimen number for the Taung Child itself—thus inexorably tying the box to the specimen. The box now sits, neatly labeled, next to the Taung Child.
The original storage box for the Taung Child. No longer in use, the box now has an accession and catalog number and is stored in the Hominid Vault at the University of the Witwatersrand, next to the Taung fossil itself. (L. Pyne)
The old wooden box entered the fossil archive, truly becoming a cultural extension of a fossil hominin discovered almost ninety years prior. Interestingly, it is the only “cultural” artifact in the fossil archive and has become an artifact turned relic. The rock breccia matrix that Dart pried the fossil out of with his wife’s knitting needles is archived along with the fossil, and that box, which all currently reside at the Hominid Vault. Adding the Taung Child’s box to the hominid laboratory says a lot about what is archived, how, and why—a testament to the Taung Child’s own cultural history. As the laboratory stores many of South Africa’s famous hominin specimens, the addition of the box poses an interesting juxtaposition of a scientific object and a cultural one and shows the fluidity of scientific collections. The hominid laboratory holds fossils—the physical, tangible fossils—but also holds the history, stories, and associations of those fossils with paleoanthropology writ large.
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A fossil hero needs an audience, and the Taung Child certainly has many audiences. The current curator of the University of the Witwatersrand fossils, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, has described the experience of observing people interact with the Taung Child fossil. “As curator of fossils, I am privileged to be one of the very few people who regularly have the opportunity to see and handle the Taung child’s skull. When I show the skull to both scientists and non-scientists, the almost predictable expressions of wonder are clearly not only brought about by the scientific significance of this, the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus, but also by the sheer beauty of the little skull.”31
There is an interesting relationship between a fossil of the celebrity caliber of the Taung Child and the introduction of new methodologies for measurement. The celebrity fossil is a pillar of the paleo community—it’s well understood, well studied, and well internalized. Because so many other methodologies have used that one fossil as a test case, testing a new methodology becomes that much more significant. For example, when digitizing fossils was first introduced into paleoanthropology as a way of capturing information about an object in three dimensions, the Taung Child was one of the first fossils to be digitized. The three-dimensional scan was published as an almost artistic portraiture in National Geographic in 1985, corresponding with the fossil’s diamond jubilee. When CT scanning was introduced, the Taung Child, again, was one of the first to be scanned. A famous fossil—even one as examined as Taung
—does more than rest on its historical laurels in the fossil archive. It still asks and answers scientific questions. Paleoanthropologist Dr. Lee Berger offered this simple observation: “The Taung Child is iconic.”32
The fossil maintains that status as yet more types of tests are conducted on it. It’s paleoanthropology’s Matthew effect as the studied fossils get studied more and the less studied fossils less so. And just as the more studied fossils become more studied, the fame that surrounds them becomes more obvious, more emphasized, and more present. The discoverers and researchers associated with something scientifically famous became scientific celebrities themselves.
Delving into the celebrity folk hero qualities that surround the Taung Child is tricky. It’s not enough to simply say, “This is a famous fossil and, by virtue of it being famous, it’s a celebrity as demonstrated through its heroic science.” Fame doesn’t work by syllogism. How we think about the fossil today is shaped by its discovery, of course, but it’s also shaped by its history, its meaning, and its mystique. Kristi Lewton recalled her experience seeing the Taung Child fossil in person: “Seeing the Taung Child in life grabbed me—it was history coming to life. When I saw the fossil, in the early 2000s, Professor Tobias was a central figure in paleoanthropology—a living legend, really. Every one of us at that fossil demo had heard the story of the origin of the Taung Child. So to see the fossil in person was incredible.”33
The Taung Child continues to influence its variety of audiences. The fossil is a compelling object from the early days of paleoanthropology, but it also speaks to the historical means of “doing science” that were at play in the early twentieth century. While the evolutionary relationship between human and Australopithecus africanus was resolved by the mid-twentieth century, questions of how Taung and his species functioned on the South African paleolandscape 2.5 million to 5.3 million years ago continue to fascinate the scientific community and capture the public imagination.
