February 4, 1893 (a Saturday)

Raymond Dart with the Taung skull.

On this date, the South African physical anthropologist and paleontologist Raymond Arthur Dart was born in Australia. His discoveries of fossil hominids led to significant insights into the evolutionary origins of human beings.

In 1924, working with students in the Taung limestone works in Bechuanaland, he was rewarded with the most interesting find. It seemed at first to be just another primate skull. Then, Dart noticed how amazingly close to human it looked. He recognized as a “missing link” in the evolution from ape to man. Dart had found the “Taung child”, only three years old at the time of death. He named it Australopithecus africanus, “australis” meaning south and “pithecus” meaning ape. His theory is now generally accepted, but was originally very controversial.