The Taung Child then and now: Commemorating its centenary in a postcolonial age

The story of the Taung Child discovery is almost legend in palaeoanthropology.In it, Raymond Dart acquires a block of calcified sediment, painstakingly removes the fossil skull from the matrix, and publishes his description of the new species Australopithecus africanus in the journal Nature 1 , only to be rebuffed by the international scientific community, but ultimately vindicated decades later following subsequent discoveries in Africa and the debunking of the Piltdown forgery [2][3][4] .Dart is portrayed as prescient, and as elevating the importance of Africa in the narrative of human origins.5 But is this a biased and simplified narrative?This history played out over a period marked by colonialism, racism, racial segregation, and, ultimately, the implementation of apartheid, making the history of human origins research intimately intertwined with the prevalent socio-political landscape.Viewed against this backdrop, and with a contemporary lens, the figure of Dart, and palaeoanthropology on the African continent more broadly, is more complex and worthy of reflection.In this special issue, published exactly 100 years after Dart's original publication, we bring together a group of African researchers and international collaborators to offer our perspective on the science, history, and legacy of palaeoanthropology in South Africa and beyond.We are particularly interested in exploring how the history of the discovery of early hominins in South Africa, as it played out in a colonial context, impacted the scientific field of palaeoanthropology.Did it promote or limit scientific enquiry?In what ways?What were its cultural effects, and how do they play out in our current context a century later?How might we work to decolonise the discipline and its narratives?Our decision to mark the Taung centenary by publishing this collection of articles in an open access South African journal, and to centre the voices of South African researchers, was a deliberate one.Too often, African palaeoanthropological heritage is the domain of international teams, with little meaningful collaboration from local African researchers -a phenomenon increasingly being recognised as "helicopter science".[6][7][8] The paucity of diverse Global South perspectives has done a disservice to the field, and has led to the perpetuation of colonial legacies and practices, while at the same time rendering much of what is going on invisible internationally, as it is not the lived experience of the researchers being centred.In this light, our goal is to celebrate the remarkable science that the discovery of A. africanus enabled, but also to probe disciplinary legacies viewed through a critical lens that challenges us to do science better.

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