Coming face to face with the Taung Child is a strangely moving experience, as if you are meeting someone you have known for ages. It - the sex is unknown - was just five years old, it lived on what is now the Highveld 2.5million years ago, it probably had a mixed diet, its brain had not evolved to a size large enough for it to speak, it walked upright but could climb trees, and it died violently, the victim of an eagle or similar raptor.Its skull, smaller than that of a five-year-old human, is now the star exhibit of the newly relocated Phillip V Tobias Fossil Primate and Hominid Laboratory, at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, and it is what curator Dr Bernard Zipfel calls "the jewel of South Africa". It is in a thick glass case under lights, in the middle of a vault housing one of the most extensive collections of hominin fossils, and casts of fossils, in the world.Wits is particularly proud that the collection was funded without foreign aid, and with huge support from the private sector and the government. Tantalisingly, there are boxes of more recent discoveries being studied and yet to be announced to the world. Foreign academics, mostly American, sit around a table handling fossils as eagerly as kids with a Lego set.But are we really related to the Taung Child, or is that stretching the imagination? Not according to Zipfel. He or she was an ape, but had more in common with humans than the living apes.Professor Raymond Dart identified the skull in 1924 after it had been blasted out of a lime quarry in what is now North West (it had spent some time on a mine official's mantelpiece). He recognised it as something new, the first early hominin fossil. It was named Australopithecus africanus (southern ape of Africa), but it took 25 years for the scientific community to believe him.full_story_image_vleft1"The Western world, with its colonial mentality, felt that humans could not have originated in Africa," explains Zipfel. "They still believed in the Piltdown Man being evidence for the origin of humans in Europe." That skull had been discovered in England in 1912, and was accepted by many as the elusive missing link, but it was exposed as a palaeoanthropological hoax in 1953 and scientific attention returned to the Taung skull, and to Wits."Hominins were creatures walking upright most of the time, even though a lot of them could still climb," Zipfel says. "The brain is a little bigger than that of a chimp, they become less snouty, the canine teeth become smaller and the diastema [gap] between the canines and incisors disappears. The foramen magnum [hole] in the skull that inserts into the spine is more central, and the environment they were moving into was more savannah, less forested."Another famous fossil, Mrs Ples, is the most complete skull of the same species. She was discovered by Robert Broom, of Wits, in 1947 near Sterkfontein, and is now housed in the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria.Other jewels in the Wits crown are partial skeletons of MH1, discovered by Professor Lee Berger's nine-year-old son, Matthew, in 2008; and MH2, found at the same Malapa fossil site at the Cradle of Humankind. MH1, also known as "Karabo", is a juvenile male; MH2 is an adult female. They are specimens of Australopithecus sediba and are just under twomillion years old.They lie on blue velvet, in glass cases on each side of the Taung Child, but MH2 has no name. "I don't like giving them cute names," Zipfel admits. "These creatures may be on a lineage to us but they are still very much apes. So are we, but very much more advanced technologically"Berger, of Wits's Institute for Human Evolution, has argued that Australopithecus africanus may have given rise to Australopithecus sediba , which in turn gave rise to the genus Homo .Zipfel has a particular interest in bipedalism, how our ancestors walked on two legs. "Freeing up their hands was quite an important part of the evolution of these creatures, allowing the free use of hands to develop technology and increase brain size," he says. "MH2 has a very nice ankle and foot complex. There is an ankle bone that looks very human, a distal leg bone that tells us it walked upright and heel bone that looks like a primitive ape that climbed trees. They are all from the same specimen: if seen apart they would have been read as being from different species."This collection underlines South Africa's claim to being the birthplace of mankind - but then so does East Africa."When we say 'conflicting claims' it's all tongue in cheek, or friendly rivalry," Zipfel explains. "We all agree that Africa is the place of human origin. Whether it was in Southern Africa or Eastern Africa, no one knows. The reason why we are finding the fossils here and in East Africa is not because these creatures did not live elsewhere, we just happen to be finding evidence of them here.story_article_right1"We have dolomitic caves in South Africa which are conducive to creatures that have died or been brought into the caves by carnivores being fossilised when the caves were filled with other material. In East Africa, they are found not in caves but on surfaces that have been eroded away."To the layman, there does seem to be a gap between the ancient hominid fossils and the more recent Homo sapiens remains, so do they tell us anything about ourselves?"Yes and no," says Zipfel. "We have a huge range of when these creatures lived. Little Foot, [being prepared and studied] by Professor Ron Clarke and his team, comes in at 3.6million years old, then Australopithecusafricanus here at 2.2million years, Australopithecus sediba at 1.95million years, Paranthropus robustus at 1.8million. Then we have archaic humans at 250000 years, and human material at 65000 years. So in the genus Homo we do seem to have a closer sense of kinship than with those further back."In other collections there is a wider range. In Ethiopia they are finding virtually the entire range, from several thousand years to 100000 years to 200000 years - which is when Homo sapiens as we know them today first came to the fore - through to half a million years, and then all the Australopiths from 1.5million to over four million years. The last eight million years would represent human evolution. That's when it is thought that the last common ancestor to us and the great apes occurred."We have no idea what that creature looked like, and that is what we would like to know. That was when there was a branch-off to the ape direction, i.e., gorillas, chimps, bonobos and orangutans; and the hominin route, which is on our lineage."It all happened here because Africa had so much biodiversity; it was temperate whereas the north was cold."Is it possible that modern humans resulted from an interbreeding between these different species [of hominids]," Zipfel asks."It was once ruled out that Neanderthals could have interbred with modern Homo sapiens but we now know they did. It still makes all of humanity genetically very closely related. We have a common African origin genetically. The world was peopled from Africa to Europe to Asia to Australasia and lastly the Americas."So yes, the Taung Child has more in common with us than it seems at first: it was one of us. Just...