Over the objections of his wife, Dart, dressed in formal wear, dug into one of the boxes. In the fall of 1924, as Dart was preparing to attend a wedding, two boxes of rocks blasted from a limestone quarry near the town of Taung were delivered at his house. Raymond Dart, an Australian-born anatomist working at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, was interested in fossils.

In 1924, a fossil discovery in South Africa challenged this view of a Eurasian homeland and revolutionized the study of human evolution. Although these ancient beings were primitive, they clearly resembled modern humans. By then, Neanderthals had been found in Europe Java Man (now known as Homo erectus) had been discovered in Indonesia and Piltdown Man ( later exposed as a hoax) had been unearthed in England. So, he concluded, “it’s useless to speculate on the subject.”īy the early 20th century, the world’s leading anatomists thought they knew the answer: Humans evolved somewhere in Europe or Asia.

However, he also noted, a large, extinct ape once lived in Europe millions of years ago, leaving plenty of time for our earliest ancestors to migrate to Africa. In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin speculated that it was “probable” that Africa was the cradle of humans because our two closest living relatives-chimpanzees and gorillas-live there. The idea that humans evolved in Africa can be traced to Charles Darwin. It’s one of my favorite stories in the history of paleoanthropology-one that involves an anatomist you’ve probably never heard of and an infant who was attacked by an eagle and dropped into a hole almost three million years ago. But you may not know how scientists came to that conclusion. If you know anything about human evolution, it’s probably that humans arose in Africa.

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