Although 74 years have elapsed since the discovery at Taung of the first Australopithecus fossil, and despite intensive fieldwork in East Africa and 32 years of non-stop excavation at Sterkfontein, there has not been a discovery to date of a reasonably intact skull and associated skeleton of an ape-man. This is an account of the extraordinary series of events that led to just such a discovery and a preliminary assessment of the significance of the fossil, which is still largely embedded in the Member 2 breccia of the Sterkfontein Caves near Krugersdorp, South Africa.
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