Unsolved mystery of the 20th century: “The skull of a child of Taung”

Let’s continue the series of articles on unsolved mysteries of the 20th century. This time about the found at the beginning of the last century, in 1924, during the excavations near the South African village of Taung, the mysterious skull of a previously unknown creature.
Unsolved mystery of the 20th century: “The skull of the child Taung”
Raymond Dart, a professor at Witootersren University (Johannesburg), was the first to get acquainted with an unusual find. An experienced professional, he immediately distinguished the skull found from those often encountered during archaeological excavations of baboons’ skulls. To a strange creature, whose skull Dart held in his hands, he gave the name “Australopithek Afrikanus”, which means “monkey man from Africa”.
Unsolved mystery of the 20th century: “The skull of the child Taung”
It should be said that the found skull looks truly impressive: a round, high forehead without eyebrows, a rather elegant jaw and visible thin bones. Everything indicates that the creature is a humanoid. The cranial box, a volume of 405 cm3, could easily increase to 440 cm3 with age. The fact is that “Australopithecus Afranius” at the time of his death was young. And therefore, this discovery has received worldwide fame under the name “the skull of a child from Taung”.
Unsolved mystery of the 20th century: “The skull of the child Taung”
Professor Dart determined that judging by the structure of the skull, the “child of Taung” is a straight and two-legged creature. And right there, contemporaries and many of his colleagues took this statement with hostility. They claimed that the found skull belonged to a monkey, because In the early stages of development, the monkey and human cubs are very similar. But the final point here was the discovery of 1944, when the remains of an adult Australopithecus were discovered. And then the “child of Taung” was declared a distant ancestor of man.
But modern scientists point to inconsistencies in this theory. In particular, respected scholars Lee Berger and Ron Clark, representatives of Witootersrend University, the one that Raymond Dart. They have been researching these remains for several years. And in conclusion, they expressed the hypothesis that, in all likelihood, they belong not to the human ancestor, not to the earthly creature, but to a humanoid.
And what is most interesting, the modern analysis was able to establish with high accuracy that death was already “humanoid Taung” more than 2.5 million years ago. What directly confirms the current version of the ancient visits of the Earth by aliens, at a time when life on the planet was only born. Therefore, no one excludes new meetings with representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations.