The Taung Child

Dr. Nicola Carrara, curator of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Padua, sent us a note on the Taung project which we willingly share:

The Paleoanthropology is littered with nicknames assigned to various discovered hominin fossils: Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), Mrs Ples (Australopithecus africanus), Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus), Twiggy (Homo habilis), the Turkana Boy (Homo ergaster), The Hobbit (Homo floresiensis), the old man of Cro-Magnon man (Homo sapiens) are some of the most famous examples.

Naming the living beings is one of the tasks of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Giving a name to someone is the first way to know him, take him into our circle and, somehow, pigeonholing him.

But the name alone is not enough. To know someone, we also need to see his face. Name and Face are an inseparable pair to frame a person, so much that you go often in crisis when someone greets us, and we identify his face, but we can not remember the associated name.

Or, when you go back with memories, you feel uncomfortable with the fact that we remember the name of some people but not the features. Incidents of this type are common and show a fundamental process of our brain: we are better when we know a person's name and his aspect!

The Taung child (Australopithecus africanus) is a fundamental fossil in the history of Paleoanthropology. Discovered by Raymond Dart at Taung, South Africa, in 1924, the find consisted of the entire face, including teeth and jaws, and the endocranial cast of the brain. Dated between 2 and 3 million of years ago, the child was about 3 years old and had a cranial capacity of 410 cc, which would have been 440 cc in adulthood.

The fossil surprised the discoverer for the modernity of some of its features: the large and "rounded" brain, the small canines, different from those of apes, and especially the relatively advanced position of the foramen magnum compatible with bipedalism.

The cast of this fossil is in many museums around the world, and it's the evidence of the evolutionary history of our species. The Museum of Anthropology at the University of Padua keeps three copies of this find, along with those of many other Hominins.

When I was approached to join the "Taung" project, the first feeling was that of curiosity: I could finally know how the face of the child looked like, whose fossilized skull was in the closet behind my desk!

The curiosity was fueled by the various progresses of the work of Arc-Team that reached me through dr. Moreno Tiziani. Since a few weeks, the strictly scientific work of the team gave a face to the Taung child.

As an anthropologist and a curator of a museum, this result is very important. All the museography linked to human evolution is moving for some time to make our ancestors more human, taking away from the head the mistaken belief of the oneness of our humanity. There were many ways of being "human" and there have been many attempts to reach humanity. The Taung child is fully embedded in this story.

The times when the French paleontologist Marcellin Boule, between 1911 and 1913, reconstructing erroneously the skeleton of the Neanderthal of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, removed him from humanity because incapable, because of its anatomy, to "raise his eyes to heaven", are really far.

Today, thanks to the dedicated work of many scholars such as Arc-Team, when I open the closet behind my desk it's nice to see a familiar face.

Padua, december 4, 2012
Nicola Carrara

Translation: Moreno Tiziani

Arc-Team and Antrocom NPO start "Taung" project

"Taung" project starts: its aim is the craniofacial reconstruction of the fossil known as "Taung child", a specimen of Australopithecus africanus discovered by Raymond Dart in 1924 in a quarry near the town of the same name in South Africa.

"Taung" is a collaborative project between Antrocom non-profit organization, an association for anthropological studies, Arc-Team, a company that operates in the field of cultural heritage, and Cicero Moraes, an expert in 3D modeling applied to the forensic context.

The Museum of Anthropology of the University of Padua has provided the casts of its collection to the experts of Antrocom NPO and Arc-Team. Among the objectives of the project: to evaluate the applicability of the used method to the reconstruction of faces of contemporary human beings, to the paleoanthropological context and to create a database of examples of application of modern techniques of digital reconstruction to the anthropological context for research and popularization.

The researchers decided to work through a three-dimensional survey of the cast of Taung child at first, and then they decided to reconstruct the facial muscles of the skull through the observation and comparison of DICOM scans of primates.

In particular, the three-dimensional survey of the find was made through techniques of Structure from Motion and Image-Based Modeling (SFM / IBM), using only free and open source software (Python Photogrammetry Toolbox). For the digital reconstruction of the facial musculature researchers chose open source programs (including Blender), modeling using the technique of "metaballs" the needed muscle bundles, while they will be used mainly the free software InVesalius for the comparison with DICOM data of other primates.

The project is located in a wider context of research that aims to explore the application of digital techniques in the museum context, with particular attention to the findings of anthropological nature.

The search results will be released as soon as possible in turn under an open source license and therefore freely distributed. Antrocom NPO and Arc-Team would like to thank, for their invaluable cooperation, the Museum of Anthropology of University of Padua, in the person of the keeper, dr. Nicola Carrara, and the Centre for Museums of University of Padua.

Antrocom non-profit organization promotes and encourages the development of studies of physical and cultural anthropology, working in scientific research, education, training and in the popularization of anthropological sciences. The Association is careful to perceive and enhance both the local tradition that the new technological perspective applied to anthropology.

Arc-Team sas is a company based in Cles (TN, Italy) formed up by young archaeologists and anthropologists working in the field of cultural heritage, characterized by wide-ranging collaborations at national and international levels. In particular, it deals with archaeological excavations, documentation and digital modeling (2D and 3D), GIS geoarchaeology, WebGIS, paleopathology, anthropology and musealization.