Taung is an internationally recognised small town situated at the intersection of the N18 National Route and R372 Regional Route in the North West Province of South Africa.
Taung is located about 20.6 km south of Pudimoe on the N18 highway and 58.2 km east of Reivilo on the R372 road.
The town’s name Taung means place of the lion and was named after Tau, the King of the Barolong people. Tau is the Tswana word for lion.
Taung falls under the Greater Taung Local Municipality in the Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati District Municipality of the North West Province.
This picturesque town, shot to fame when an Australian anthropologist, Professor Raymond Dart, found a two million year old skull here in 1924. Professor Dart named it the Taung skull, after the region. The little skull is that of a child of about 3 years old, was classified as Australopithecus africanus, one of the earliest hominids that lived in southern Africa.
Taung Heritage
Early humans and pre-humans sought shelter In caves, frequently in limestone caverns. When they died their remains were incorporated into the eroded cave breccia, a kind of limestone conglomerate. Modern humans mining these same caves for limestone many years later found heaps of strange bones, but took little notice until, slowly, the fossil finds came to the attention of the scientific community.
In 1924, Professor Raymond Dart became the first person to correctly identify a skull (complete with milk teeth and a large puncture mark in the cranium) found in the Buxton limeworks near Taung (North West Province) as the fossil remains of a small child. What had killed it?
Dr Lee Berger seems to have solved the world’s oldest murder mystery: the area is littered with the bones of monkeys and other small creatures, probably carried there by eagles to devour at their nesting sites. Just imagine the parents’ horror when a giant bird swooped down on the savanna around three million years ago and carried off their precious offspring.
