Artist: Bernard Long (biography)
Medium: Gouache on Board
Size: 5" x 12" (130mm x 310mm)
Date: 1983

This is the unique original Gouache painting by Bernard Long.

The first Australopithecus specimen, the type specimen, was discovered in 1924 in a lime quarry by workers at Taung, South Africa.

The specimen was studied by the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, who was then working at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The fossil skull was from a three-year-old bipedal primate that he named Australopithecus africanus.

The first report was published in Nature in February 1925. Dart realised that the fossil contained a number of humanoid features, and so he came to the conclusion that this was an early human ancestor.

From the book Prehistoric Man illustrated by Bernard Long and Rupert Oliver.