The discovery of the Taung skull of Australopithecus africanus Dart and the neglected role of Professor R.B. Young

Abstract

To celebrate the life and work of Professor Emeritus H.B.S. Cooke FRSSAf, this contribution reverts—as Basil Cooke was wont to do—to some early and little-known paragraphs in the opening volume of African palaeo-anthropology. The author explores the latest evidence bearing on the dates when the skull of Australopithecus from Taung was discovered and blasted out by M. de Bruyn, when it was selected by R.B. Young from fossil-bearing lumps of breccia and brought back by him to Johannesburg, when it was handed over to R.A. Dart, and when Dart completed the extraction of the skull from the matrix and despatched his manuscript to the editor of Nature. New evidence on the many parts played by Professor Robert Burns Young, the head of geology at Witwatersrand University, in the chain of discovery of Australopithecus, is presented, much of it for the first time. Young's long-neglected role is revealed and a plea is made that, even 80 years after the events, it would be appropriate and just for history to accord belated posthumous recognition of Young's role in the story of what many regard as the most important fossil hominid found in the twentieth century.