The skull also possesses features more commonly found in humans than apes, including a rising forehead and round eye sockets.

[6] In the early 20th century, the workers at limestone quarries in Southern Africa routinely uncovered fossils from the tufa formations that they mined.

Many were of extinct fauna, which included baboons and other primates, and the more complete or somehow more interesting fossils were kept as curiosities by the Europeans who managed operations.

When Josephine Salmons, a friend of the Izod family, paid a visit to Pat's home, she noticed the primate skull, identified it as from an extinct monkey and realised its possible significance to her mentor, Raymond Dart.

When a consulting geologist, Robert Young, paid a visit to the quarry office, the director, A. E. Speirs, presented him with a collection of fossilised primate skulls that had been gathered by a miner, Mr. De Bruyn.

[8] When Dart examined the contents of the crate, he found a fossilized endocast of a skull showing the impression of a complex brain.

They were much more skeptical about this fossil's place in evolutionary history, and believed it deserved to be categorized as a chimp or gorilla rather than a human ancestor.

Grafton Elliot Smith stated that he needed more evidence and a larger picture of the skull before he could judge the significance of the new fossil.

Arthur Smith Woodward dismissed the Taung Child as having "little bearing" on the issue of "whether the direct ancestors of man are to be sought in Asia or Africa".

The next year, Hrdlička personally commented on another of Dart's articles, this time in Natural History, saying that the author "very ingeniously, but, it seems obvious, more or less artificially, endeavors to humanize the 'Australopithecus'.

It is not known that this effort thus far has found favor with any other student who gave truly earnest and critical attention to the otherwise very interesting and important Taung relic.

First and foremost was the fact that the British scientific establishment had been fooled by the hoax of the Piltdown Man, which had a large brain and ape-like teeth.

[17] A third reason is that, despite accepting that modern humans had emerged by evolution, many anthropologists believed that the genus Homo had split from the great apes as long as 30 million years ago and so felt uneasy about accepting that humans had a small-brained, ape-like ancestor, like Australopithecus africanus, only two million years ago.

Using a "metrical and statistical approach" that he thought was superior to purely descriptive methods,[20] he decided that the creatures had not walked on two legs and so were not an intermediate form between humans and apes.

[21] For the rest of his life, Zuckerman continued to deny that Australopithecus was part of the human family tree, even when that was the conclusion that had become "universally accepted" by scientists.

[22][23] Dart's claim that Australopithecus africanus, the species name that he had given to the Taung Child, was a transitional form between apes and humans was almost universally rejected.

Employed by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Gregory supported Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley's then-unpopular view that humans were closely related to African apes.

[26] The director of the museum, however, was Henry Fairfield Osborn; despite being "the chief public defender of evolution in the United States" at the time of the Scopes Trial in 1925, he disagreed with Darwin's views on the origins of humanity.

[30] The turning point in the acceptance of Dart's analysis of the Taung Child came in 1947, when the prominent British anthropologist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark announced that he supported it.

Le Gros Clark, who would also play an important role in exposing the fraud of the Piltdown Man in 1953, visited Johannesburg in late 1946 to study Dart's Taung skull and Broom's adult fossils, with the intention of proving that they were only apes.

On that day, Keith, who had been one of Dart's most virulent critics, composed a letter to the editor of Nature announcing that he supported Clark's analysis: "I was one of those who took the point of view that when the adult form [of Australopithecus] was discovered it would prove to be near akin to the living African anthropoids—the gorilla and the chimpanzee.

In this writing, Falk discovered that she and Dart had come to similar conclusions surrounding the evolutionary process of the brain that Taung indicates.

There, too, Dart detailed how Taung's endocast was expanded globally in three different regions, contrary to the suggestion that he believed hominin brains evolved back-end-first, in a so-called mosaic fashion.

[5] Using a biochronological approach examining the ratios of dimensions of lower first molar teeth, the date for the Taung Child can be placed at 2.58 million years, coincidentally at the boundary between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene.