Unburied is back for season 2: The Taung Child.

A century after the fossilised skull of a three-year-old surfaced at the Northern Limeworks in Taung, South Africa, we retrace how a newly found species, Australopithecus africanus rooted human origins in Africa, while exposing the colonial prejudice that shaped its telling. Across four episodes, we trace the unnamed hands behind the find, revisit the Piltdown hoax that blinded Europe to Africa and rejected the Taung Skull, and reckon with the discoverer Raymond Dart’s conflicting legacy. The season dismantles the lone-explorer myth and asks what ethical, collaborative science can look like, on the ground, in public, and in the stories we pass on.

The series is produced in partnership with The Human Evolution Research Institute (HERI) and draws on original research published in the South African Journal of Science special issue, “The Taung Child then and now: Commemorating its centenary in a postcolonial age.”

Unburied is a production by ARC in partnership with the University of Cape Town and the Human Evolution Research Institute. Written, produced, and sound designed by Rasmus Bitsch and Neil Liddell. Hosted by Rasmus Bitsch, journalist and podcast creator.

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In this ARC Interview: "What’s Real About Race?" we speak with Dr. Phila Msimang, a philosopher at Stellenbosch University whose research critically assesses the uses and abuses of group descriptors like race and ethnicity in the sciences, and Dr. Tessa Moll, an anthropologist whose work explores medicine, reproduction, and the politics of health in South Africa. Using their collaborative infographic on the shifting history of racial classification, we unpack how race has been invented, imposed, and contested over centuries, and why, though socially constructed, it continues to have very real effects in our lives today.

The infographic: https://figshare.com/articles/figure/An_abridged_timeline_of_shifting_racial_classification_in_South_Africa_1652-present/29100497?file=55053449

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In his book Letters of Stone professor Steven Robbins tells the deeply moving story of his quest to find out what happened to the family members he only knew from a picture on the wall of his childhood home in South Africa.

In this interview Steven reveals the surprising connections between his family members murdered in nazi death camps, the race science done by people like Rudolf Pöch in the Kalahari and the connections between struggles of land and identity across time and space. All of which is connected to the sleepy town of Williston in the middle of the Karoo.

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