What Is Paleoanthropology? From Lucy to Taung Child the Finds That Rewrote Human Origins

Digging Up Our Past—What Is Paleoanthropology?

Paleoanthropology is the study of human origins and evolution through fossil evidence. Some of the most important paleoanthropological finds have helped define where it is that we—Home sapiens—have come from. Paleoanthropology blends paleontology, anthropology, geology, and genetics to answer a deceptively simple question: how did we become human? Researchers examine fossilized bones, teeth, footprints, and stone tools to reconstruct how our ancestors looked, moved, ate, and lived. They also work out when and where those ancestors lived, using dating techniques like radiometric dating and the study of sediment layers.

The field has transformed our understanding of ourselves. Rather than a straight line from ape to human, the fossil record reveals a branching family tree with many species, some of which overlapped in time.

Five Top Paleoanthropology Discoveries

1. Taung Child (1924). Anatomist Raymond Dart described the skull of a young child found in South Africa and named the species Australopithecus africanus. Its features suggested an upright-walking human relative, and Dart argued that Africa, not Asia, was the cradle of humanity.

Did you know you can see Taung Child as part of the Ancient Odysseys Cradle of Humankind Dig Itinerary in South Africa?

Image courtesy of Tanzania Tourism

2. Laetoli Footprints (1978). Preserved in volcanic ash in Tanzania, a trail of footprints roughly 3.6 million years old, found by a team led by Mary Leakey, shows early hominins walking upright on two legs. It remains some of the clearest evidence that bipedalism arrived long before large brains.

Gerbil, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

3. "Lucy" (1974). Found in Hadar, Ethiopia, by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray, this partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis is about 3.2 million years old. Roughly 40 percent of her skeleton was recovered, an extraordinary amount for a fossil that old. Her pelvis and leg bones confirmed that she walked upright, while her small brain case showed that walking came first.

Image courtesy of the author

4. Turkana Boy (1984). Discovered in Kenya by Kamoya Kimeu's team, this nearly complete skeleton of a Homo erectus adolescent is about 1.6 million years old. It revealed a body strikingly like our own, tall and long-limbed, and gave scientists a rare view of growth and development in an early human relative.

Did you know you can see Turkana Boy as part of the Ancient Odysseys Koobi Fora Dig in Kenya?

The skeleton fragments of "Ardi" Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

5. "Ardi" the Ardipithecus ramidus Skeleton (1994, announced 2009). Found in Ethiopia's Middle Awash region is a partial skeleton that is about 4.4 million years old, roughly 1.2 million years older than Lucy. Ardi had a grasping big toe for climbing trees, yet a pelvis adapted for walking upright. The find challenged the old assumption that our ancestors looked like modern chimpanzees, suggesting instead that humans and chimps each evolved away from a more primitive common ancestor. Because the fossils were fragile and took years to excavate and study.