To the Taung Child of a Grieving Australopith Mother, Likely Killed by an Eagle

Kathleen Bryson

CN: child death

From your monkeyed mother to maternal egg
and fatherly sperm-competition gold-medal winner,
you balance on that ancestral beam from which we all fall.
A trapeze act of digit to prehensile toe, a static skull,
often plastic, often juvenile.
The indentations on just such plastic, plaster, 3-D powder,
the curved beauty you grew yourself with the fine stuff of
amino acids, proteins, hope, but then you were cut short
with too many teeth in your X-rays,
all those extra, never-to-erupt rows menacing
the rest of us through an uncanny valley,
the rouged teeth and claws of our pasts.

Then said skull is replicated later,
some three million birthdays later,
sketch mirrors plaster mirrors stone mirrors bone
bumps dug out by your original mirror-neurons.
What is missing here?
The certainty of your childhood.
That for every child fossil we see, there was deep grief.
That no matter when the evolution of tears first dripped forth,
australopithecine parents grieved your death unaccountable,
inconceivable as every child’s death is.
That empathy is both gradualist and convergent.
That grief is both gradualist and convergent.
That not just Homo or pith,
but the monkeys, the rodents, the birds sorrow too.

That our detachment from you 
is the aberrant derived trait:
it is we who display,
like some should-be shameful peacockiness,
what Zahavi calls a costly signal:
we lack grief here, but we have no lack of red teeth.

The Science

The Taung Child is the fossilised skull and natural brain endocast of a young Australopithecus africanus from South Africa, dating to approximately 2.8 million years ago. Dental development suggests that the child was roughly three to four years old at death. ‘Australopith’ is an informal term for a member of a group of extinct, bipedal African hominins that includes Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Our own genus, Homo evolved from australopith ancestors. The ‘prehensile toe’ references australopith mosaic locomotion: habitual bipedalism alongside retained climbing adaptations. ‘Sperm competition’ means competition between sperm from different males to fertilise the same ova. The damage to the Taung skull, particularly scratches and punctures around the eye sockets, resembles damage found on primates killed by large African eagles. The hypothesised eagle is both an absent predator and the hidden cause of the child’s death.

I always think about the fact that most of the sources for fossil representations we view dispassionately likely once caused great grief in others such as family members or friends at the time of their deaths. The poem’s unknown mother’s grief is informed by evolutionary continuity: long-living and highly social nonhuman animals often display grief behaviour, such as extant nonhuman primate mothers displaying prolonged and complex responses to dead infants across numerous species. Birds can exhibit striking responses to death and rat mothers do, too. In the poem, ‘gradualist’ means that capacities such as attachment and grief evolved by degrees, while ‘convergent’ suggests that comparable responses may also have evolved independently in different animal lineages. ‘Zahavi’ refers to evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi, who proposed that fancy traits such as the peacock’s tail can function as costly signals: conspicuous displays advertising that their bearer can afford the burden they impose. The poem invokes the show-off quality of such signalling rather than its reliability. Here, humans parade their emotional detachment, reversing Tennyson’s description of ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ in In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) by shifting the image of red-toothed predatory violence onto humans.

The Poet

Kathleen Bryson is an Alaskan-born evolutionary anthropologist, with a day job as an EU VR/AI research fellow and with previous posts at Oxford and QMUL. She has had four novels previously published, 25+ short stories in venues such as Your Impossible Voice and Bending Genres, and 60+ poems in publications including Magma, Ghost City Review, Star*Line and Always Crashing. Her first full-length poetry collection, Luciferin, will be published imminently by erbacce-press.

Next poem: Tomorrow, the Swallows by Don Raymond