A New Way of Looking at a Very Old Skull

This mylar-like sheet, mounted on a paper board, helped make a groundbreaking magazine cover at the height of the 1980s hologram craze—one of three such images National Geographic commissioned during that decade. To create it, the late optical scientist Kenneth Haines spent six weeks in a darkened lab in Pretoria, South Africa, shooting concentrated beams of light at a fossilized skull of the early hominin Australopithecus africanus.

The skull, now known as the Taung Child, has a remarkable history. Found in 1924 in a limestone quarry in Taung, South Africa, it’s now estimated to be some 2.5 million years old, but its discovery sparked a decades-long debate over its age and significance—one that ultimately refuted ethnocentric assertions that our earliest ancestors originated in Europe or Asia, not Africa.

Capturing a hologram of the fossil was a daunting challenge. Holography demands exacting conditions: a perfectly still, lightless laser lab and an object that gives off minimal surface reflections. To start the process, a single laser beam is split in two—one beam travels directly to a light-sensitive glass plate, while the other bounces off the object. When these beams reunite, their waves interfere with one another, creating a pattern that’s recorded on the plate.

Linda Law, a holography specialist who assisted Haines, explains that, during this process, anything that moves the object more than a hundredth of the width of a human hair will blur or erase the image entirely. Even a truck passing by outside can cause enough vibration to ruin a day’s work.

When Haines arrived at the Pretoria facility, he ran into several problems: The lab wasn’t lightproof; the fossil-mounting structure shook too much; and the fossil had been coated with a glossy preservative. Worse, the lab’s laser repeatedly broke down, forcing Haines to fly in his own equipment from New York.

After many attempts, he was able to make an acceptable image of the skull—minuscule peaks and troughs etched onto a light-sensitive plate. These impressions were transferred to a master plate made of nickel, which was then converted into production plates that embossed plastic sheets with microscopic relief. The sheets were backed with a thin, reflective aluminum layer, causing the image’s colors to shift like oil in a puddle, creating the illusion of depth.

Producing 11 million of these holograms was an industrial feat. But when the November 1985 issue landed in mailboxes around the world, there was the Taung Child, seeming to hover above each cover, gazing out from the deep past.