Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. The skulls of Australopithecus africanus third from left and other hominins shed light on the lives of our ancestors.
In November — on the day they were hosting a wedding at their Johannesburg home in South Africa — Australian anatomist and physician Raymond Dart and his wife Dora noticed two men staggering up the drive with two large boxes.
In just a few weeks — astonishingly — Dart was able to use this one individual to surmise the broad course of human evolution as we understand it today.
Previous evidence for human ancestry made use of fossils that bore a closer resemblance to modern humans. There were, however, things that Dart could not have known and details that he misconstrued.
Today — a century on — the fossil is still prompting questions about human evolution. But it took decades and the discovery of more australopithecine fossils in South Africa before scientists began to accept his controversial ideas about human evolution. At the time, several fellows of the Royal Society of London thought that a specimen found in the village of Piltdown in East Sussex, UK, known as Piltdown Man which was later exposed as a hoax , belonged to the oldest ancestor leading to modern humans.
