The fossil of a child offers clues about the evolution of childhood

A Century Later: A Homo Fossil from Dmanisi, South Africa, and a Birthplace of a Child

Smith and other suggest that the evolution of childhood probably happened in Homo erectus because of increased body size, brain size and cognitive capacities. Meanwhile, some researchers have found that the rate of dental growth in an approximately 1.77-million-year-old Homo fossil from Dmanisi, Georgia, was relatively high9 — similar to the rate of dental growth found in Taung and living great Apes 6. In this specimen, however, the formation of the posterior teeth was delayed, as it is in modern humans. The emergence of a child may have been delayed because Dmanisi individuals had brain size that was less than those of great apes or australopithecines.

On 7 February 1925, Nature published an article about a curious fossil unearthed in South Africa1. ‘Australopithecus africanus: Raymond Dart, an Australian palaeoanthropologist, sent a man-Ape of South Africa to him. In his memoirs, Adventures with the Missing Link (1959), Dart notes that he was dressing for a wedding when he was distracted by the delivery of two large boxes of rocks, containing the face of Australopithecus and the braincast (known as an endocast) — an internal cast of the braincase formed from sediment — that fitted into the skull, like a ball in a baseball pitcher’s mitt.

The report of the skull and matching endocast was published in Nature on February 7, 1925. Both the discovery and Dart’s insights deserve to be celebrated. Things that Dart could not have known were included. Questions about human evolution are still being posed by the fossil a century later.

B. Holly Smith found Taung to be mature at the rate of a non-human ape and it was well versed in solid foods. According to Smith, the transition to independence was the cause of Tafung’s death. It was not a “‘child’ in any scientific sense”6.

Human babies are slow to mature and remain dependent on their parents for a long time, unlike ape babies who are more active after a few months after birth. Indeed, most apes do not have a childhood — a period during which individuals who are weaned continue to be nurtured, mainly by their elders.

Childhood is probably a crucial innovation in human evolution because it creates the opportunity for offspring to learn much more from their nurturing elders than would otherwise be possible. It is believed that the emergence of a period of dependency and helplessness inhuman ancestors has contributed to the development of cognitive evolution.

The criticism was fierce and fast. The London-based grandees of anthropology observed that the children of humans and other apes were just as similar as a non- human ape. They might also have been irked by Dart’s comments about the humanlike jaw of Australopithecus. The idea was that the largebrain of humans came before the humanlike jaw and the rest of the skeleton. An upright ape with a small brain and humanlike jaw, therefore, went against the grain.

Although things have changed, the field of palaeoanthropology10 has been slow to recognize the contributions of the many women, including Salmons, and African scholars who made key discoveries. One such researcher was Kamoya Kimeu, one of the greatest observers of human origins, who died in 2022. His successors are, increasingly, leading research today. The collections aim to celebrate all those who contributed to humanity’s evolving understanding of this part of the human story. The people might have changed, but Africa remains the heart of human origins.

Ethiopia was considered to be on the palaeoanthropological map at that time. Other countries in Africa would soon join it, with key fossils found in Chad7, Malawi8 and Morocco9. And Nature was there to document every new bone and tooth. New and exciting discoveries are in the works in West Africa.

Two collections are published by Nature, together with Nature Africa and Nature Communications. The first includes 100 papers that charted this journey and reveal the part that this journal has played in documenting it. The second is about the field of paleoanthropology and how it relates to Africans today.