Origin Stories

Raymond Dart was getting dressed for a wedding when he was given two boxes of rocks and fossils. Inside the boxes, he found the first evidence of humanity’s African origins. This episode tells the story of the 1924 discovery of the Taung Child through a never-before-released lecture by Dr. Raymond Dart. Show Notes The Leakey Foundation is celebrating its 50th anniversary by sharing rare, previously unreleased lectures from the Foundation’s archive. The fourth lecture in this "From the Archive" series is by Dr. Raymond Dart, a neuroanatomist, discoverer of the Taung Child, and the person who named the genus Australopithecus. Raymond Dart was born in Australia in 1893. He studied biology and became a medical doctor specializing in neuroanatomy. He moved to South Africa in 1922 to help establish the anatomy department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In 1924, as he was getting dressed for a wedding, he received two boxes full of rocks and fossils from a nearby mine. The fossils inside those bo