Just as unfortunate was that the ambiguity of who had the authority to excavate where led to occasional friction between Broom and Dart. Dart remarried, and his second marriage was happier or at least longer lasting than his first, but it wasn't trouble free.
His second wife gave birth to a daughter in and a son in , but the son was premature, born at six and a half months. At birth, he weighed just over two pounds. The boy spent weeks in an incubator, and developed cerebral palsy. In , Dart suffered a nervous breakdown, and though he attributed the episode to overwork associated with World War II, there was some speculation that anguish over his son's condition was the real problem. But Dart eventually returned to work and got on with his life.
Le Gros Clark had completed extensive studies of anthropoid apes in museum vaults to familiarize himself with the normal variations. Planning to play the devil's advocate to Dart, he instead left South Africa convinced that the Taung Child was part of the human family tree. Le Gros Clark's conclusion paved the way for acceptance of the Taung Child as human.
Several years later, Le Gros Clark would prove instrumental in exposing the Piltdown skull as a hoax. In the end, even Keith, who had long doubted Dart's claims, admitted he had been right about the Taung Child. Although ahead of his time in many ways, Dart was a product of his time in others. He felt the Khoisan people of South Africa had a childlike appearance and therefore assumed they must also have childlike behavior. When a colleague, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, argued at a conference for the British Association for the Advancement of Science that elegant stone towers at Great Zimbabwe were the work of native Africans, not white Europeans, Dart angrily stormed out of the room, having never actually visited Great Zimbabwe himself.
Science historian Robin Derricourt observes that Dart was weighing in on a topic outside his area of expertise, but he may have shared the view common among European settlers and their descendants: Indigenous Africans were uncivilized, so anything impressive had to be attributable to someone else. That doesn't mean Dart was a straight-up racist; he opened Wits Medical School to non-whites, and spoke out against discrimination.
Like many others in the field of human origins, Dart believed that apes stood up and smartened up when African savannas opened up, and "Man-Apes" had to contend with predators such as saber-toothed cats. Although paleontologists have revisited the role of savannas in human origins, too many fossil finds — Ardipithecus ramidus , Sahelanthropus tchadensis , Orrorin tugenensis , for example — strongly suggest that hominids were walking upright in forested environments sometime between 4 million and 7 million years ago.
Dart had his gaffes as well. In the s, he developed a idea about australopithecine culture that he called osteo-donto-keratic meaning bone-tooth-horn theory. In he moved to South Africa to take up the appointment, there extending his interest in early anatomy to include physical anthropology and palaeontology.
His work was a combination of laboratory research and fieldwork. In he was working with his students in the Taung limestone works in the Harts Valley, Bechuanaland now Botswana. As Chrissy Duhn writes:. Raymond hypothesised that Australopithecus africanus used tools made from the long bones of gazelles, antelopes and wild boar. In , the fossilized skull of a child, half-ape, half-human, found its way without warning into the hands of a young anatomist in Johannesburg, South Africa.
He was in an excellent position to interpret it and, in the subsequent paper in Nature , to challenge the accepted concepts of the time. This man was Raymond Dart; his insight shows the value of the prepared mind. He was thirty years old and not enamored of the prospect. He later recalled, "I hated the idea of uprooting myself from what was then the world's center of medicine [University College, London]…to take over the anatomy department at Johannesburg's new and ill-equipped University of the Witwatersrand.
I felt I had lived a pioneer's life for quite long enough in my younger days. Dart wished to establish an anatomical museum in his new department, and his attention was drawn to fossilized baboon skulls that were being unearthed in a lime mine at Taung in the northern Cape. In Adventures with the Missing Link , Dart relates how two boxes of fossils from Taung were delivered to his house one Saturday afternoon in , just as he was dressing for a wedding reception to be held there.
Unable to contain his curiosity, he wrenched open the boxes in the driveway. The first did not seem to contain anything of interest.
But when he looked into the second, he later recalled:. It was not big enough for primitive man, but even for an ape it was a big bulging brain and, most important, the forebrain was so big and had grown so far backward that it completely covered the hindbrain.
But was there anywhere among this pile of rocks, a face to fit the brain? I ransacked feverishly through the boxes. My search was rewarded, for I found a large stone with a depression into which the cast fitted perfectly. I stood in the shade holding the brain as greedily as any miser hugs his gold, my mind racing ahead.
Here I was certain was one of the most significant finds ever made in the history of anthropology. Darwin's largely discredited theory that man's early progenitors probably lived in Africa came back to me. Was I to be the instrument by which his 'missing link' was found? All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events.
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