Historian Christa Kuljian and paleoanthropologist Dipuo Kgotleng talk to The Conversation Weekly podcast about the complicated legacy of the Taung child skull, 100 years since its discovery.

He painstakingly removed a fossil skull from this material ... It was nicknamed the Taung Child, a reference to the discovery site and its young age. The international scientific community ...

The first significant discovery was that of the "Taung child" in 1925. Found in South Africa, the skull belonged to a child who was at a stage of development of a present-day six year old.

Inside the box, he found a fossilized mold of a brain and a matching child’s skull partially buried in stone ... The 2.5-million-year-old “Taung Child” or “Taung Baby,” as Dart called ...

Historian Christa Kuljian and paleoanthropologist Dipuo Kgotleng talk to The Conversation Weekly podcast about the complicated legacy of the Taung child skull, 100 years since its discovery.

which became known as the Taung child skull. The paper's author, an Australian-born anatomist called Raymond Dart, argued that the fossil was a new species of hominin called Australopithecus ...