Human Evolution
Year of Discovery: 1924
What Is It? Humanoids evolved first in Africa and, as Darwin had postulated,
developed from the family of apes.
Who Discovered It? Raymond Dart
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
Humans have always wondered how we came to be on this planet. Virtually every culture and religion has created myths to explain the creation of humans. In the early twentieth
century, most scientists believed that the first humans appeared in Asia or Eastern Europe.
Then Dart discovered the Taung skull and provided the first solid evidence both of an African evolution of the first humanoids and a fossil link between humans and apes, substantiating one part of Darwin’s theories. This discovery redirected all of human evolutionary
research and theory and has served as a cornerstone of science’s modern beliefs about the
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