A child’s skull pulled from a limestone quarry in South Africa in 1924 now carries a new age: between 2.96 and 3.03 million years. Prof. Gabriele Macho of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and an international team report that range for the Taung Child, the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus. Their paper, released on Nov. 9, also argues that the skull does not match several adult fossils long grouped alongside it.
The day in tech, in one email: TLDR is the daily newsletter with links and TLDRs of the most interesting stories in startups, tech and programming.
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
Pinning down a date for Taung has been stubborn for decades. Uranium-series measurements from the 1980s and early 1990s gave figures near 0.76 to 1.0 million years, which later researchers argued reflected uranium added after the bones were buried, while estimates built on fossil animals from the same region clustered around 2.8 million years. A range of 2.96 to 3.03 million years sits at the top end of what any method has suggested.
A skull found in 1924 and a range of 2.96 to 3.03 million years
The Smithsonian’s human origins program describes the Taung skull as the first early human skull ever found in Africa. Raymond Dart described it and named the species Australopithecus africanus, and scientists needed more than 20 years to accept that Africa was a major source of human evolution. The find now belongs to a World Heritage listing, where UNESCO records the Taung Skull Fossil Site as a 1999 extension, located in a limestone quarry at Dart Pinnacle.
Macho leads the Archaeology, Environmental Changes and Geo-Chemistry research group at the Brussels university, and the EurekAlert release from the university gives the new age as between 2.96 and 3.03 million years old. The announcement names no dating method and none of the co-authors, so the route from sediment or fossil to those two figures is not spelled out in the summary. The full paper, which carries the DOI 10.1038/s44513-026-00008-2, holds that detail, and a reading copy is posted at a shared-access link from the publisher.
Where the skull sits in the wider record matters for the new age. The Smithsonian gives the species a span of about 3.3 to 2.1 million years ago and notes that most Australopithecus africanus fossils come from Sterkfontein, including the specimen nicknamed Mrs. Ples. The partial skeleton known as Little Foot, still largely embedded in the cave sediments there, is dated to about 3.3 million years. A Taung age near 3 million years would put the child within that window rather than at its late edge.
UNESCO adds that the serial listing of fossil hominid sites has produced evidence on human evolution across at least the past 3.5 million years, and that the Makapan Valley caves hold traces dating back about 3.3 million years.
Why Taung’s growth pattern does not fit the Sterkfontein adults
The team compared tooth structure, brain development and the way teeth grew during childhood. By those measures, several adult fossils traditionally filed under Australopithecus africanus do not follow the same developmental trajectory as the Taung Child. Differences in brain development, the researchers say, point to more than one hominin species living alongside one another, or one after another, in the Sterkfontein region.
Macho put the shift in perspective in the release. For over a century, the working assumption was that Taung was one of many similar fossils from its era, and she says the new findings turn that assumption around. In her words, the human family tree was “a chaotic, tangled bush driven by climate shifts” rather than a neat, straight trunk.
Fossil pollen backs the climate story. It indicates the child lived in a wetter, more forested landscape than South Africa offers today. The climate argument carries the paper’s central claim about ancestry. Wet and dry cycles, the researchers say, repeatedly isolated populations, brought them back together and let them hybridize, so the Sterkfontein region may have hosted several lineages whose members looked alike enough to be filed under one name. If the Taung Child belongs to a different developmental pattern than the adults, calling every fossil of that era africanus lumps together animals that grew up differently.
The earlier lead-dating of Taung’s flowstone
A separate 2025 geochronology paper by Pieter Vermeesch and a coauthor, summarized on Vermeesch’s page at University College London, used uranium-lead dating on a flowstone layered above the fossil-bearing deposit. Its preferred result was 2.961 plus or minus 0.059 million years, presented as a minimum age for the flowstone and therefore for the skull, with no upper bound found. Drilling below the discovery site produced no datable carbonate that could set a ceiling.
Whether the new 2.96 to 3.03 million year range rests on that same flowstone work is not stated in the release, and this article does not assume it. The match at the lower end is notable, though, because both put Taung near 3 million years rather than at the 2.8 million often quoted. The unresolved question is the one the release leaves open: which method produced the two-sided bracket of 2.96 and 3.03 million years, and how well uranium movement in the cave deposits has been ruled out. Vermeesch’s own page warns that uranium mobility is a problem for every dating approach used at Taung, so the full paper’s treatment of that issue will decide how firmly the new age holds.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
The day in tech, in one email: Get TLDR →
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
More from Morning Overview
- Over 20 trillion gallons of rain fell on the Four Corners states and Nevada in two weeks
- A handful of car transmissions are so tough that mechanics say they almost never die
- Two Kentucky residents died when a small plane crashed at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks, and the NTSB is investigating
- 11 engines built to run well past 200,000 miles
