New podcast from HERI: How the Taung Child challenged science and bias

The skeleton of a three-year-old child, fossilised in ancient rock, has been silent for over 2 million years — until now. In the riveting new podcast Unburied Season 2: The Taung Child, listeners are transported back to 1924 Taung, South Africa, where one discovery would upend colonial narratives, question scientific authority, and force the world to accept what many refused to believe: that human origins lie in Africa.

“The Taung Child is a prism through which we can understand the history of modern science and South Africa. It is a story of pride and knowledge but also prejudice and the damage done by scientists blinded by their own privilege,” says Rasmus Bitsch from ARC, which produced the series in partnership with the Human Evolution Research Institute (HERI) at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Across four episodes, Unburied S2 traces the reverberations of the Taung Child not just in science, but in race, identity and justice. Featuring the voices of geologists, paleoanthropologists, historians, and the Taung community, it surfaces forgotten voices and confronts colonial prejudices to ask what ethical science means in history and today.

“The Taung Child is one of the most valuable fossils in the world, and part of our rich cultural heritage in South Africa. But few know the full story and the way in which it became significant – this is as important as the fossil itself and only now has been properly told.” says HERI Co-director Associate Professor Robyn Pickering, a Geologist at UCT.

This year is the centenary of the 1925 Nature publication where Raymond Dart described the fossil remains as Australopithecus africanus. Dubbed the “Taung Child”, this was the first evidence that early human relatives lived and walked in Africa. Yet its reception was lukewarm: many in the international scientific community clung to ideas of human origins centred in Europe or Asia and dismissed the evidence from Taung.

That rejection was based as much on scientific bias as it was on colonial prejudice. The Taung Child was not just ignored — the stories around it were shaped, moulded and sometimes silenced by the bias. Unburied S2 revisits these stories to question who found the fossil, who named it, who was left out, and how the so-called lone-hero narrative came to dominate.

Much of Unburied S2 draws on the South African Journal of Science special issue, “The Taung Child Then and Now: Commemorating its Centenary in a Postcolonial Age”, which was guest edited by several UCT and HERI researchers. Recognising the legacy of the Taung Child and research advances since its discovery, the podcast skilfully packages scientific reflection with relevance and makes these otherwise specialist papers accessible to a much wider audience.

“This goes beyond the discovery of the Taung Child to explore the bigger picture. It is about who is doing the science, where it happens, and why that context matters just as much as the fossils themselves,” says Associate Professor Lauren Schroeder.

“By centring current South African researchers and the Taung community, this podcast invites listeners to think about the science of human evolution not just as a series of exciting discoveries, but as a human story shaped by place, historical context and perspective.”

Unburied Season 2: The Taung Child is available now across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It is brought to you by ARC, in partnership with HERI and UCT. It is written, produced, and sound-designed by Rasmus Bitsch and Neil Liddell; hosted by Rasmus Bitsch.