taung儿童发现的故事几乎是古人类学中的传奇。In it, Raymond Dart acquires a block of calcified sediment, painstakingly removes the fossil skull from the matrix, and publishes his description of the new species Australopithecus africanus in the journal Nature 1 , only to be rebuffed by the international scientific community, but ultimately vindicated decades later following subsequent discoveries in Africa and the debunking of the Piltdown forgery 2–4 .dart被描绘成有先见之明,并提高了非洲在人类起源叙事中的重要性。5但是这是一个有偏见和简化的叙述吗?这一历史在以殖民主义,种族主义,种族隔离为标志的时期中发挥了作用,最终使种族隔离的实施使人类起源研究的历史与普遍的社会政治景观紧密地交织在一起。在这种背景下观察到了当代的镜头,飞镖的人物和对非洲大陆的古人类学,更加复杂,值得反思。