But in 1924, Raymond Dart, an Australian professor of anatomy based in South Africa, discovered the first important African hominin fossil. It was a skull sitting among a collection of other fossils, the skull of a child from the species now known as Australopithecus africanus, part of a large group of australopithecine species that first appeared about five million years ago. After this discovery, more and more hominin fossils began to turn up in Africa, and most paleoanthropologists now believe that our species evolved somewhere in Africa. From the 1930s, Louis and Mary Leakey began finding
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