Taxonomic affinities of the immature hominid crania from Hadar and Taung

The description¹ of the AL 333-105 cranium from the East African Pliocene provides a new opportunity to re-examine the suggestion^2-4 that the Taung child may be a robust rather than a gracile form of early hominid. Comparisons of these two crania with the skulls of living and fossil hominoids indicate that AL 333-105 possesses autapomorphic features associated with paranthropine masticatory hypertrophy, and provide additional evidence for the existence of this lineage in the Hadar Formation. Here, I report a study of the facial morphology of the Taung specimen which, together with recent observations on its dentition⁵, provides strong evidence against the allocation of the Taung child to the Paranthropus clade. The identity of the specimen is recognized as being in the Homo lineage.