Taung child is about 3 million years old, but its species is poorly defined, study says

A flowstone lying above the fossil gives a minimum age of 2.962 million years, give or take 59,000, while brain and tooth comparisons suggest the adult fossils long filed with the Taung child may not belong to one species.

Peer reviewed · Fossil and growth comparisons · Small samples · Climate explanation proposed, not tested

The Taung child, the small skull that founded the species Australopithecus africanus in 1925, lived between about 2.96 and 3.03 million years ago, according to a study published on 5 November 2026 in npj Palaeoecosystems. Gabriele Macho of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and seven colleagues also compared its brain and teeth with adult fossils assigned to the same species and found no consistent grouping. They propose that shifting climate and mixing between populations shaped southern Africa’s early hominins. That idea is a hypothesis, and the fossil samples are small.

Evidence at a glance

Is this a big deal?

For the age, it is a solid step: published estimates spanned about two million years, and the new window is about 70,000 years wide. For the species question, it is a careful challenge, not a verdict. It adds growth-based evidence to a doubt raised since the 1980s, but names no new species.

What scientists found

The age comes first. The team dated a flowstone, a layer of mineral laid down by dripping or flowing water, that sits above the deposit the skull came from. Its uranium-lead age is 2.962 million years, plus or minus 59,000 years. Because the flowstone formed after the fossil was buried, that is a minimum age. Earlier magnetic data cap the age at 3.03 million years, so the authors pin the child to 2.96 to 3.03 million years ago, in the Pliocene.

The second result is about who the child’s relatives were. Strictly speaking, the paper argues, the Taung skull is the only fossil that is unquestionably A. africanus. Hominin fossils from Sterkfontein and Makapansgat were folded into the species in the 1950s, a “rationalisation” in the term of the time, made without identifying shared defining features. The team’s growth comparisons suggest Taung could have grown into an adult like the Sterkfontein skulls Sts 5 and Sts 60. They found it unlikely to have grown into Sts 71, MLD 37/38 or the large-brained StW 505.

The teeth add a twist. On the shape of the surface beneath the enamel of the first lower molar, Taung sits at the edge of the A. africanus cluster and is equally distant from Sts 18, a fossil usually assigned to A. africanus, and SK 61, a Paranthropus robustus fossil from Swartkrans. Paranthropus is a separate, heavy-jawed branch of the family.

How they found it

The fossil was found in 1924 in the Buxton Limeworks quarry, near Taung in what is now North West Province, and Raymond Dart described it in Nature in 1925. The exact layer it came from was lost during mining, which is one reason estimates of its age have ranged from 942,000 years to 3.03 million years. South African caves lack the volcanic ash layers that make eastern African sites easier to date.

The team, which includes Pieter Vermeesch of University College London, used a variant of uranium-lead dating, based on the decay of uranium-235 to lead-207, that is largely unaffected by an initial imbalance in the rock’s uranium. The more common uranium-238 method needs a correction for that imbalance which, for material older than 1.5 million years, can carry an uncertainty larger than the correction itself. The two methods disagreed here; the team adopted the older uranium-235 result.

For growth, the team measured 935 points on digital casts of the inside of six fossil skulls, Taung included, and on 101 chimpanzee and 84 gorilla skulls ranging from young to adult. Taung, with its first permanent molar in place and its second still inside the jaw, fell in age group 7 of the 15 dental stages used for the apes. The brain question can be pictured like matching a school photo of a six-year-old to the right adult in a crowded family album: you have to predict how the face will change. The limit of that comparison is the key one here. The team used chimpanzees and gorillas as the guide to how a brain case changes, because no living species grows exactly like an australopith.

On that guide, the brain-size numbers are the clearest. Chimpanzees at Taung’s tooth stage have reached 92% of average adult brain volume and gorillas 87%. Taung’s brain volume, about 402 to 410 millilitres (a little more than a standard 330 ml drink can), would be only 71% of StW 505’s adult volume. That gap makes the two an unlikely match.

The molar comparison used 132 points traced along the ridges of the dentine beneath the enamel, a surface that forms early, is under strong genetic control and is little changed by wear. Tooth-development scores came from 11 Australopithecus and 16 Paranthropus fossils, compared with 158 chimpanzees, 50 gorillas and 560 modern humans.

For the environment, the team processed two rock samples, of 172 g and 230 g, taken near the dated flowstone. Each yielded about 30 well-preserved pollen grains, a small count. The team also compiled climate records from ocean cores off southeast and northeast Africa and compared them with a climate model run covering the past 3 million years.

Why it matters to you

This won’t change anything in your daily life. It speaks to where our own lineage came from. A century ago the Taung child helped spur the search for human ancestors in Africa. If the fossils filed under its name are several kinds of hominin, working out which of them led toward Homo gets harder.

The pollen also hints at a different Taung. Today the area is semi-arid open savanna with about 400 mm of rain a year, an average temperature of about 17 °C and roughly 25% woody cover. The ancient samples include pollen of Podocarpus trees, which today grow mainly on the wetter eastern Escarpment about 400 km to the east, and of trees typical of Bushveld savanna now found about 300 km to the northeast. The authors read this as a more wooded, wetter setting, though the samples are undated beyond coming from near the flowstone.

What the evidence does not show

It does not show how many species lived at Sterkfontein, or name any. The authors write that “no clear picture emerges regarding the relationship of the Taung child with other hominins,” and they give three reasons: small samples, no other fossil preserving all of Taung’s parts, and fossils spread widely in time and place. The other specimens they studied did not cluster consistently either.

It does not test the climate explanation. The paper finds that wet-dry conditions in southeastern Africa swung more strongly between about 4 and 2.5 million years ago than between 2.5 and 1.6 million years ago, with a roughly 400,000-year rhythm tied to changes in Earth’s orbit. The idea that hominin populations followed shifting habitats, drifted genetically and sometimes hybridised is offered as a framework for future testing. The authors note the links between orbital cycles, regional climate and evolution are “complex and unresolved”.

The age also has a soft edge. The flowstone age is a minimum, the upper limit relies on earlier magnetic data rather than a second radiometric date, and additional drilling and screening have not yet produced a radiometric upper limit.

How this fits what we already knew

Doubts about lumping these fossils together are old. Some researchers have argued that Sts 71 and the near-complete skeleton StW 573, known as Little Foot, belong to a second species, Australopithecus prometheus, while others reject that name. Earlier studies of Taung’s face suggested it might have grown into an adult more like Sts 71 than Sts 5. The new paper’s brain-shape results point the other way, toward Sts 5 and Sts 60, which shows how much depends on the growth model chosen.

The age debate is also live. In 2024, Francis Thackeray of the University of the Witwatersrand reported an age of 2.58 million years for the Taung child, from a method based on the proportions of first molars in dated eastern African fossils. The new minimum age is older than that by roughly 380,000 years. Other SciQuest reports show how climate records are being tied to hominin movements elsewhere, such as the wet phases recorded in Arabian dust, and how fossil pollen is used to reconstruct ancient plant life.

Independent view

SciQuest found no on-record comment from a researcher outside the team as of 11 November 2026, and could not request one during this automated run. The published literature shows where the disagreements lie. A 2024 paper in Biology Letters by John Rowan and Bernard Wood calls the fossil the “Taung juvenile”, a label the new paper links to the view that australopiths grew on a broadly ape-like schedule; the new paper argues that a slower second-molar stage leaves room for Dart’s word, child. A 2025 paper by J. M. Martin and colleagues argued that StW 573 should not be attributed to A. prometheus. We will add outside comment if we obtain it.

How other headlines framed it

The VUB release, reposted by Phys.org, says the fossil shakes up the human family tree, and quotes Macho describing the tree as “a chaotic, tangled bush driven by climate shifts.” The EurekAlert! version names the journal as Nature; the paper is in npj Palaeoecosystems, a Nature Portfolio journal. Discover Magazine leads with the tangled-bush image but frames it as a suggestion. Sci.News leads with the puzzle, saying the fossil still confounds researchers a century on. La Brújula Verde says it upends human evolution again. SciQuest’s headline gives the measured age and keeps the paper’s own caution about the species.

What happens next

The authors say a radiometric upper age limit is still missing despite more drilling, and that several key fossils need better reconstruction: the crushed Paranthropus skulls from Swartkrans, the Drimolen specimens now being rebuilt, and the distorted StW 573 skull. We will update this page if new dates or reconstructions change the picture. For a related question about how anatomy is read for human ancestors, see how monkey feet complicate a key assumption about early hominin walking and climbing.

In one sentence

The fossil that named Australopithecus africanus is now dated to about 3 million years, and a careful look at how it would have grown suggests the adults filed alongside it may not all be the same species, though the paper stops short of saying which.

Read next

• Monkey feet complicate a key assumption about human evolution: another case where living primates are used to read hominin fossils.
• Ancient proteins mark Xujiayao fossils as Denisovan: how a different line of evidence settles which species a fossil belongs to.
• Green Arabia and hominin expansions: climate records linked to where early humans could live.

Sources and disclosure

1. Macho G. A., Neubauer S., Zanolli C., Vermeesch P., Kuykendall K. L., Koutsodendris A., Kolb L. S., Caley T. “The Taung child and the biogeographic and palaeoclimatic drivers of southern African hominin diversity.” npj Palaeoecosystems 1, 7 (2026). doi:10.1038/s44513-026-00008-2. Received 4 April 2026, accepted 26 August 2026, published 5 November 2026. Open access, CC BY 4.0.
2. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 9 November 2026: Three-million-year-old Taung child once again shakes up our human family tree (source of the Macho quote).
3. Dart R. A. “Australopithecus africanus: the man-ape of South Africa.” Nature 115, 195–199 (1925). doi:10.1038/115195a0.
4. Rowan J., Wood B. “Dart and the Taung juvenile: making sense of a century-old record of hominin evolution in Africa.” Biology Letters 20, 20240185 (2024). doi:10.1098/rsbl.2024.0185.
5. Thackeray F. “How old are South African fossils like the Taung child? New study offers an answer.” University of the Witwatersrand, 23 July 2024 (republished from The Conversation): wits.ac.za.

Disclosure: This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. SciQuest read the paper’s full main text but not its supplementary file; the Martin et al. (2025) and earlier face-growth studies are described as the paper summarises them. Calculations by SciQuest: 3.03 − 0.942 ≈ 2.09 million years for the earlier spread of estimates; 3.03 − 2.96 = 0.07 million years (70,000) for the new window; 2.96 − 2.58 ≈ 0.38 million years between the two dates; 402 ml ÷ 330 ml ≈ 1.2 drink cans. The authors declare no competing interests; the paper reports a European Research Council grant to Macho. The graphic is a SciQuest original; no figures or photos from the paper or the release are used. Spotted an error? See our corrections policy.