This podcast was originally published in 2014.

This is the Nature Pastcast, each month raiding Nature's archive and looking at key moments in science.

In this show, it's the 1920s, and a fight is on5, Australopithecus Africanus, the man-ape of South Africa.

The discovery of osteopithecines, as they're called, was crucial for how we view human evolution.

This was the beginning of the proof that Charles Darwin was right, that the human line

originated in Africa.

I'm Chris Stringer and I'm research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

Well, I've got a replica here of the material that was published in nature in

1925, this new form of proto-human, as it was claimed at the time, called Australopithecus

Africanus, the Southern ape of Africa. Page 195, Australopithecus Africanus, by Professor

Raymond A. Dart, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Raymond Dart was then a young professor of anatomy, and in 1924 he was handed a couple of boxes of material that had come out of a site called Tong, a place that was being quarried for limestone.

In quarrying they were going through caves and in these caves were fossil monkeys and other animals.

So Darp got these couple of boxes of what were thought to be fossil monkeys and in there he noticed there was a lump of limestone that seemed to be in the shape of a brain.

So he thought it was very interesting and when he looked further,

he saw that there was a piece of bone in a block of matrix

and a block of cemented material that looked like it fitted onto it.

A condition of affairs where virtually the whole face and lower jaw, replete with teeth,

together with the major portion of the brain pattern, have been preserved,

constitutes a specimen of unusual value in fossil anthropoid discovery.

It's fascinating to hear Dart's account of when he first opened the boxes and looked at this material.

And it so happened that he got to a critical stage in the preparation of this material when he was first working on it, that he was supposed to be going to a wedding.

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