science

Taung

Taung is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Taung rather than just read about it. In short: Taung is a small town situated in the North West Province of South Africa. The name means place of the lion and was named after Tau, the King of the Barolong people King Tau wa Thibela.

Key takeaways

Taung belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Taung to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Taung from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Taung is a small town situated in the North West Province of South Africa. The name means place of the lion and was named after Tau, the King of the Barolong people King Tau wa Thibela. Tau is the Tswana word for lion.

Taung skull fossil site

In 1924, a skull (later named the Taung Child) was discovered by a quarry-worker in the nearby Buxton-limestone quarry. It was described by Raymond Dart in 1925 as the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus after he received a shipment of mostly fossil baboons, but also containing the skull and face of the child. Surprisingly, it would be many years before Dart would visit Taung to determine the exact location of the find. By that time, lime-mining had destroyed much of the area. Later in-situ excavations were conducted under the direction of Phillip Tobias and Jeffrey McKee of the University of the Witwatersrand, who worked at the site from approximately 1989 until 1993. Although they failed to find additional hominid specimens, they did recover many important fossil baboons and increased the understanding of the Taung geology and taphonomy significantly. Unlike the dolomitic caves near Johannesburg, South Africa and the site of Makapansgat, the Taung fossil sites are found in caves formed in a gigantic tufa flow coming off the dolomitic bedrock of the Kalahari escarpment. The Taung Child is among the most important early human fossils ever discovered. It was the first hominid to be discovered in Africa, a species later named Australopithecus africanus, supporting Charles Darwin's concepts that the closest living relatives of humans are the African apes. It furthermore demonstrated significant differences between reality and the fake skull of a proposed human ancestor from England known as the Piltdown Man or Eoanthropus. The little skull is hypothesized to be from an approximately three- to three-and-a-half-year-old child. The cast of the brain is preserved by the filling of the skull with limestone breccia. The skull is housed at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Taung Child was at first proposed to have been killed by other hominids as part of Raymond Dart's Osteo-Dento-Keratic Culture hypothesis. However, later work by C.K. "Bob" Brain demonstrated that the child was probably killed by some sort of mammalian carnivore such as a leopard. Recently, however, studies of the associated baboons by Ron Clarke and Lee Berger, and identification of specific marks on the Taung Child skull have demonstrated that the Taung Child may have been killed and eaten by a large bird of prey.

Climate

See also Hominids Cradle of Humankind List of human evolution fossils North West Cultural Calabash

References

Sources P.V. Tobias, Dart Taung and the Missing Link (Inst. for the Study of Man in Africa, 1984) L.R. Berger and B. Hilton-Barber, In the Footsteps of Eve (National Geographic Press, 2001) L.R. Berger and B. Hilton-Barber, Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind (Struik, 2001) L.R. Berger Am. J.Phys. Anth. 131:166-168 (2006)

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Taung

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Taung claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Taung before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Taung ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Taung

In research: Taung appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Taung in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Taung is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Archaeological sites in South Africa, Archaeological sites of Southern Africa, Caves of South Africa, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Taung outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Taung in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Taung means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Taung out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Taung in simple terms?

Taung is a small town situated in the North West Province of South Africa. The name means place of the lion and was named after Tau, the King of the Barolong people King Tau wa Thibela.

Why does Taung matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Taung?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Taung.