The status of the Taung Child fossil has changed a few times.
"The idea that the skull belonged to a new genus was identified by comparison with skulls of chimpanzees. The endocast of the Taung child was larger than a fully grown chimpanzee's. The forehead of the chimpanzee receded to form a heavy browridge and a jutting jaw; while the Taung child's forehead recedes, but leaves no browridge. The Taung child's foramen magnum (a void in the cranium where the spinal cord is continuous with the brain) is located beneath the cranium, showing that the creature stood upright.
The British scientific establishment was at the time enamored with the hoax Piltdown Man, which had a large brain and ape-like teeth – the exact opposite of the Taung Child – and Dart's interpretation was not appreciated for decades."
After Dart presented the fossil of Australopithecus africanus, he received substantial criticism from scientists.
Arthur Keith, one of the most prominent anatomists to comment on the fossil, said: "[Dart's] claim is preposterous, the skull is that of a young anthropoid ape . . . and showing so many points of affinity with the two living African anthropoids, the gorilla and chimpanzee, that there cannot be a moment's hesitation in placing the fossil form in this living group".
Solly Zuckerman carried out studies of the Australopithecines family. Zuckerman thought that Australopithecus was little more than an ape. Zuckerman and a four-member team worked on the issue in the 1950s. Zuckerman decided that these creatures had not walked on two legs and were not an intermediate form between humans and apes. The concluding report by Zuckerman read:
"For my own part, the anatomical basis for the claim that the Australopithecines walked and ran upright like man is so much more flimsy than the evidence which points to the conclusion that their gait was some variant of what one sees in subhuman Primates, that it remains unacceptable".
Dean Falk, a specialist in neuroanatomy, declared that the Taung skull belonged to a young monkey. "In his 1975 article, Dart had claimed that the brain of Taung was humanlike. As it turned out, he was wrong about that. . . . Taung's humanlike features were overemphasized"."Like humans, [apes and monkeys] go through stages as they grow up. In his analysis of Taung, Dart did not fully appreciate that infant apes have not had time to develop features of the skull, such as thickened eyebrow ridges or attachment areas for heavy neck muscles, that set adult apes apart from human. Apparently he did not carefully consider the possibility that Taung's rounded forehead or the inferred position of the spinal cord might be due to the immaturity of the apelike specimen rather than to its resemblance to humans".
John Reader said that "Dart drew bold conclusions from his unavoidably limited observations".--Wiki
Taung creates a change from "larger brain development comes before upright walking" to "upright walking comes before larger brain development".
"According to the era’s prevailing view— “proven” by the anatomy of the Piltdown specimen, which was later unmasked as a hoax—increases in brain size preceded the emergence of other human attributes during early hominin evolution. While the Taung skull had human-like characteristics such as small canines, a steep forehead, and a spinal cord alignment that suggested bipedalism, Taung’s brain size was closer to that of a nonhuman ape. The fossil heralded a new direction."
But this view of evolution creates an interesting conflict. "The obstetrical dilemma refers to two conflicting trends in the evolutionary development of the human pelvis where the transition to walking upright, bipedal locomotion, required a decreased size of the bony birth-canal but the trend toward increased intelligence required a larger cranium, which would need a wider obstetrical pelvic area."--Wiki
--Dave
