How the Taung Child Skull Became a Holographic National Geographic Cover

For six weeks, in a darkened laboratory in Pretoria, South Africa, an optical scientist named Kenneth Haines fired concentrated beams of laser light at a fossil skull. The skull belonged to an early hominin, Australopithecus africanus, and the result of his work would arrive in mailboxes around the world in November 1985 as the cover of National Geographic.

The skull is now known as the Taung Child. It was found in 1924 in a limestone quarry at Taung, South Africa, and is currently estimated to be about 2.5 million years old. Its discovery set off a debate lasting decades over how old it was and what it meant. That debate ultimately undercut ethnocentric claims that our earliest ancestors had come from Europe or Asia rather than Africa.

The magazine commissioned three holographic images during the 1980s, at the height of a craze for the technology. The Taung Child was one of them. Making it was a hard job. Holography requires a perfectly still, lightless laser lab and an object that gives off as little surface reflection as possible. A single laser beam is split in two. One beam goes straight to a light-sensitive glass plate, while the other bounces off the object. When the two reunite, their waves interfere, and the resulting pattern is recorded on the plate.

Linda Law, a holography specialist who assisted Haines, explains how unforgiving the process is. Anything that moves the object by more than a hundredth of the width of a human hair will blur the image or erase it entirely. Even a truck passing outside can shake the setup enough to ruin a day's work.

The Pretoria facility offered little of that stability. When Haines arrived, he found that the lab was not lightproof, that the structure meant to hold the fossil shook too much, and that the fossil itself had been coated with a glossy preservative, which is the opposite of what holography wants. The lab's laser also broke down repeatedly. Haines ended up flying in his own equipment from New York.

After many attempts, he produced an acceptable image of the skull: tiny peaks and troughs etched onto a light-sensitive plate. Those impressions were transferred to a master plate made of nickel, which in turn was turned into production plates. The production plates embossed plastic sheets with microscopic relief, and each sheet was backed with a thin reflective layer of aluminum. The backing makes the image's colors shift like oil in a puddle and gives the illusion of depth.

The scale of the print run was an industrial feat of its own: 11 million of the holograms. When the November 1985 issue arrived, the Taung Child appeared to hover above each cover, looking out from the deep past.

The cover has since become an artifact in its own right. A sheet like the one used for the cover, mounted on paper board, can be seen at the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration in Washington, D.C. The story also appears in the October 2026 issue of the magazine.