Born in Africa

ARRIVING IN JOHANNESBURG in January 1923 to take up a post at the new University of the Witwatersrand, Raymond Dart, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian, felt a profound sense of foreboding. Only with great reluctance had he been persuaded to forsake his London-based career for the backwaters of South Africa. In London, as a senior demonstrator in the anatomy department at University College, he had been able to work alongside some of the giants of British medicine; but Johannesburg was little more than an overgrown mining camp, remote from the forefront of medical research. Although given the rank of professor, Dart feared he had taken a wrong turn. Johannesburg, he later recalled, seemed more like a place of exile than one of opportunity.

It was worse than he had expected. He took an instant dislike to Johannesburg, with its endless rows of red-painted, corrugated-ironroofed buildings. ‘It seemed to have progressed little since the days of the gold rush towards the end of the [nineteenth] century and one felt that if a financial slump hit the place, it would become a deserted ghost-town in a matter of days’.

Moreover, he found the facilities offered by the new university to be entirely inadequate. The medical school—a double-storeyed building hidden behind ten-foot-high garrison walls—stood amidst high grass and weeds and exuded ‘a general air of dereliction’. The anatomy department consisted of a dissecting hall with three side-rooms, a lecture theatre and an underground basement mortuary, bereft of almost all equipment. He recalled: ‘The architect had overlooked the necessity for planning water taps, electric plugs, gas or compressed air for student laboratories’. The walls of the dissecting hall were spattered with dirt and other marks indicating their use for football and tennis practice. On trestle-type dissecting tables lay dried-up portions of corpses covered only by scant hessian sheets. During a preliminary tour of inspection, Dart’s American wife, Dora, a former medical student from Cincinnati, was so distressed by the conditions that she burst into tears. To add to his consternation, Dart next discovered that the medical school did not even possess a library.

Nor did he receive much of a welcome from either university colleagues or students. His predecessor had been a popular figure who had been forced to resign, amidst a storm of protest and controversy, as a result of his affair with the chief college typist and his subsequent divorce.

Dart also encountered lingering resentment over his Australian nationality. Australians were disliked by many Afrikaners because of their involvement in the Anglo-Boer war on the side of the British. Shortly before he left London, Dart was shown a letter from Professor Jan Hofmeyr, the university’s principal, expressing ‘regret that the appointee was Australian’.

Close to despair, Dart resolved to press for improvements to the anatomy department. He began to establish a medical library and a specimen collection. He also tried to keep up research he had started in London on the nervous system and the evolution of the brain. But, frustrated by the lack of equipment and scientific literature, he soon found it necessary to divert his attention to other areas, notably anthropology, in which he had previously taken only a passing interest.

As a medical student in Sydney, he had striven in particular to avoid the subject of bones. Now he was obliged to study bones instead of brains. Recalling his early experience at the University of the Witwatersrand, Dart remarked: ‘It would be useless to deny that I was unhappy in the first eighteen months’.

The sequence of events that propelled Dart to international fame began in May 1924. On a visit to a limestone quarry at Buxton near the African village of Taung in the northern Cape, a mining company official, E. G. Izod, was shown what looked like a fossilised monkey skull embedded in limestone rock. It had been thrown up with broken limestone during blasting operations and kept in the manager’s office at Buxton as a souvenir. Izod decided it would make an excellent paperweight and took it back to his home in Johannesburg. His son thought it might interest some university friends and showed it to one of Dart’s students.

When Dart first saw the monkey skull, he realised it was a significant find. Within minutes he sped off with the skull in his Model T Ford to consult a colleague, Professor R. B. Young, a veteran Scottish geologist. Young was familiar with the geology of the Taung area. By coincidence, he had been commissioned to investigate lime deposits a few miles south of Buxton, and he promised Dart that on a visit he was due to make to the area in November 1924, he would call at Buxton and look out for further likely specimens.

Shortly before Young arrived at Buxton, an alert quarryman, M. de Bruyn, blasting out a section of rock-face, noticed an unusual shape among the breccia blocks. De Bruyn had previously collected a number of fossilised baboon skulls from the site, but this latest object appeared to be different. He was sufficiently intrigued to take two bone-bearing blocks to the manager’s office. They were still there when Young called. He immediately recognised their importance, carried them back to Johannesburg and, on 28 November, drove over to Dart’s house.

It was an inopportune moment. The Dart household was in the throes of preparing for a marriage ceremony at the house for two friends, at which Dart was to be best man. His wife, Dora, had made elaborate arrangements. But Dart was transfixed by the fossil blocks that Young had brought him. From his knowledge of brain formation, he instantly discerned part of an ape’s skull with distinct hominid features.

I knew at a glance that what lay in my hands was no ordinary anthropoid brain. Here in lime-consolidated sand was the replica of a brain three times as large as that of a baboon and considerably bigger than that of any adult chimpanzee.

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?

Engrossed by the rock, Dart ignored his wife’s remonstrations to get ready for the marriage ceremony. Only when the bridegroom began tugging on his sleeve did he take notice. ‘My God, Ray,’ said the bridegroom in an agitated tone, ‘You’ve got to finish dressing immediately—or I’ll have to find another best man. The bridal car should be here at any moment’.

For the next three weeks, Dart used every spare moment to patiently chip away the matrix from the skull. He had no previous experience of such a task, nor any colleagues to whom he could turn for advice. Nor could he find any relevant textbooks other than what he had brought from London. Nor did he have any suitable tools. Apart from a hammer and some chisels he purchased from a local hardware store, his most useful implement turned out to be his wife’s knitting needles that he kept sharpened to a fine point. Day after day he worked in constant fear that the slightest slip of a chisel might shatter the fossil within.

Nothing like it had been discovered before. Dart’s fossil consisted of an endocranial cast—a natural mould of the inside of the skull—and a well preserved facial structure including both jaws, all twenty of the milk teeth, and the first of the permanent teeth to erupt, the upper and lower first molars.

What particularly impressed Dart were the humanlike features of the Taung specimen: its high, domed forehead; its lack of eyebrow ridges; its large and rounded eye sockets; its lightly built lower jaw; the small profile of its teeth. Instead of protruding like that of an ape, the face had a flatter appearance. Its age, he calculated, on the basis of its teeth structure, was about the same as a human at a similar stage of development—some six years. Its brain, however, appeared to be relatively small. Dart estimated the skull capacity to be 520 cubic centimetres, bigger than a chimpanzee’s but smaller than a gorilla’s. He was struck in particular by the position of the foramen magnum, the aperture through which the spinal cord leaves the cranium and enters the spinal column: It was situated at the base of the skull rather than towards the rear, as in the case of quadrupedal apes. This could only mean one thing, Dart surmised: The Taung child must have walked upright, like humans.

Excited by these findings, Dart opened his article for Nature with the bold claim that the Taung specimen represented ‘an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man’—‘a man-like ape’, possessing ‘humanoid’ characteristics. To mark its status, he proposed a new genus and species for it: Australopithecus africanus; austral from the Latin, meaning ‘southern’; pithecus, of Greek origin, meaning ‘monkey’ or ‘ape’.

Dart speculated freely about its place in the history of human evolution. Because the Taung child had walked upright on two feet, he said, its hands had been freed to assume ‘a higher evolutionary role’. It was able to carry out ‘more elaborate, purposeful, and skilled movements’ than apes, using its hands as ‘organs of offence and defence’ and for making tools. Its brain structure not only enabled it to process sight, sound and touch more thoroughly than any ape but indicated that it was within reach of the ability to acquire language.

Dart wrote about the attributes of the new species not in sober scientific prose but with breathless enthusiasm:

They possessed to a degree unappreciated by the living anthropoids the use of their hands and ears and the consequent faculty of associating with the colour, form, and general appearance of objects, their weight, texture, resilience and flexibility, as well as the significance of sounds emitted by them. In other words, their eyes saw, their ears heard, and their hands handled objects with great meaning and to fuller purpose than the corresponding organs in recent apes. They had laid down the foundations of that discriminative knowledge of the appearance, feeling, and sound of things that was a necessary milestone in the acquisition of articulate speech.

He speculated, too, about the location where it had been found. Taung, he noted, was on the fringe of the Kalahari Desert. It was some 2,000 miles distant from the luxuriant tropical forests of central Africa—the natural habitat of ape populations. In central Africa, he wrote, ‘Nature was supplying with profligate and lavish hand an easy and sluggish solution, by adaptive specialization, of the problem of existence’. But anthropoid groups venturing into southern Africa, where conditions were harsher, had been obliged to develop new techniques. ‘For the production of man a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect—a more open veldt country where competition was keener between swiftness and stealth, and where adroitness of thinking and movement played a preponderating role in the preservation of the species’.

He recalled how Darwin had predicted that Africa would prove to be the cradle of humankind. ‘In my opinion’, he wrote, ‘Southern Africa, by providing a vast open country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water, together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human evolution’.

Even though Dart had not yet completed his work on digging out parts of the skull, he decided to despatch his findings to England. On 6 January 1925—only forty days after first catching sight of the Taung child—Dart posted his article to Nature, together with line drawings and photographs, in time to catch the Cape Town mail boat. He also alerted the local press. He anticipated a degree of scepticism from the British scientific establishment. What he did not expect was outright rejection.

Dart’s manuscript arrived on the desk of the editor of Nature, Richard Gregory, on 30 January. Gregory considered its claims to be ‘so unprecedented’ that he sent proofs of the article to four eminent experts: Sir Arthur Keith, who was the current doyen of British evolutionary studies; Grafton Elliot Smith, the brain specialist at University College, London; Sir Arthur Smith Woodward from the Natural History Museum; and Wynfrid Duckworth, a Cambridge anatomist. But before the four experts had time to give it much consideration, news swept around the world that Dart had discovered ‘the missing link’.

On 3 February, the Johannesburg Star published a scoop about the Taung child, based on Dart’s article and photographs that he had given to its news editor. The Star’s report was carried by other newspapers the following day—Dart’s thirty-second birthday—turning the fossil into a global sensation. Headlines focused upon some of Dart’s more dramatic claims: ‘Ape-Man of Africa had commonsense’; ‘Missing Link that could speak’; ‘Birth of Mankind’. For days, Dart was inundated with cables offering congratulations. Learned journals asked for articles; publishers proposed book contracts.

But the reaction of the scientific establishment was far more cautious. During the three years that Dart had spent in London, working at University College, he had gained a mixed reputation. He was seen as having high potential but also a troublesome streak. A paper he had produced on nerve cells challenging accepted opinion had turned out to be wrong; Dart’s adamant defence of his position had raised concerns among some scientists that he ‘might be inclined too hastily to arrive at conclusions on too little evidence’. Sir Arthur Keith recalled in his autobiography: ‘Of his knowledge, his power of intellect and of imagination there could be no question; what rather frightened me was his flightiness, his scorn for accepted opinion, the unorthodoxy of his outlook’. Keith had been willing to recommend Dart for the Johannesburg post, but he had done so, he said, ‘with a certain degree of trepidation’.

What immediately disturbed the scientific establishment was the speed with which Dart had leaped into print. The protocol they followed required scientists to spend months, even years, studying specimens before proffering their conclusions. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward had kept a skull from Singa in the Sudan for ten years before publishing a short report on it. The British Museum took seven years to publish a full assessment of a skull from Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) found in 1921.

But there were more profound reasons for the hostile reaction that Dart encountered. Prominent scientists such as Keith and Elliot Smith were convinced that the key factor enabling humans to emerge from the ape masses was brain power; a large brain, they insisted, had preceded the development of other faculties, such as upright walking. Keith had worked out a specific threshold needed for a specimen to be included in the genus Homo: a cranial capacity of 800 cubic centimetres or more. This theory about the importance of brain size had led Keith and Elliot Smith to validate the Piltdown skull as authentic. They continued to regard Piltdown Man as the most important discovery yet made in the search for human origins. By contrast, Dart’s specimen had a small ape-sized brain.

Dart’s article was published in Nature on 7 February, and one week later Nature published the comments of the four eminent experts it had solicited. All four emphasised the difficulty of assessing a fossil, especially a juvenile fossil, from a preliminary report and a few photographs. But they all nevertheless detected more similarities with apes than humans.

Keith’s opinion, in particular, carried enormous weight. He was a central figure in an international circle of distinguished scientists, holding high office in several scientific organisations. His initial response was guarded:

It may be that Australopithecus does turn out to be ‘intermediate between living anthropoids and man’, but on the evidence now produced one is inclined to place Australopithecus in the same group or sub-family as the chimpanzee and gorilla. It is an allied genus. It seems to be near akin to both.

Elliot Smith was more sceptical. During Dart’s tenure at University College, he had acted as his mentor and had been instrumental in persuading him to take up the post in Johannesburg. But now he was worried about the extent of Dart’s claims. ‘Many of the features cited by Professor Dart as evidence of human affinities, especially the features of the jaw and teeth mentioned by him, are not unknown in the young of the giant anthropoids and even in the adult’. And he asked for more proof. ‘What above all we want Professor Dart to tell us is the geological evidence of age, the exact condition under which the fossil was found, and the exact form of the teeth’.

Smith Woodward was dismissive. ‘I see nothing in the orbits, nasal bones, and canine teeth definitely nearer to the human condition than the corresponding parts of the skull of a modern young chimpanzee’. He challenged Dart’s assertion about an African origin for humankind. ‘The new fossil from Africa certainly has little bearing on the question’. And he concluded by regretting that Dart had chosen to use a ‘barbarous’ combination of Latin and Greek in naming the specimen Australopithecus.

Duckworth was more sympathetic. It was illustrations from Duckworth’s treatise Morphology and Anthropology that Dart had used to make a comparison between the Taung specimen and apes. But he raised the question of whether the apparent humanlike features were not due to the young age of the specimen and concluded that the Taung child was most closely related to a gorilla.

In answering this barrage of criticism, Dart was severely hampered by the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the Taung child’s skull. At the time the skull was picked up in the quarry, no attempt had been made to measure, photograph or accurately record the site’s stratigraphy in a way that would have helped establish how old the specimen was. The all-important question of the age of the skull thus remained unresolved. Nor was Dart able to overcome the difficulty of proving that the ‘humanoid’ features to which he had pointed were not due to its childlike age; no adult specimen was available.

But the most formidable hurdle he faced was how to overcome objections about the size of its brain. Keith calculated that the infant Australopithecus possessed a brain capacity of less than 450 cubic centimetres; and that the brain capacity of an adult of its kind would reach no more than 520 cubic centimetres. It was thus hardly a suitable candidate for being in the direct line of human ancestors.

Worse was to follow. The experts had based their opinions entirely on Dart’s description and illustrations. They were keen to see, if not the original specimen, then at least a cast (replica) of it. But Dart was slow to produce casts. No one in his department knew how to make them; nor did he. Eventually he hired a professional plasterer for the job.

But instead of giving the experts a preview of the casts, Dart sent them as exhibits to the South African pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London that was due to open in June. There they were mounted in a glass cage under a banner proclaiming ‘Africa: The Cradle of Humanity’, with charts asserting the Taung child to be a direct human ancestor. To get a glimpse of the casts, the experts were obliged to gaze through the glass cage, while jostling with members of the public. Keith was furious. ‘For some reason, which has not been made clear, students of fossil men have not been given an opportunity of purchasing these casts’, he protested. ‘If they wish to study them they must visit Wembley and peer at them in a glass cage’.

Outraged by Dart’s conduct, the scientific establishment closed ranks against him. After observing the plaster casts, Keith rejected Dart’s entire case. ‘The famous Taung skull is not that of the missing link between ape and man’, he said in a press statement. In a letter to Nature on 22 June, he reported: ‘An examination of the casts exhibited at Wembley will satisfy zoologists that this claim is preposterous. The skull is that of a young anthropoid ape—one which is in its fourth year of growth, a child—and showing so many points of affinity with the two living African anthropoids, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, that there cannot be a moment’s hesitation in placing the fossil form in this living group’. The Taung ‘ape’, he said, was ‘much too late in the scale of time to have any place in man’s ancestry’.

Elliot Smith followed suit. In a lecture at University College, he remarked: ‘It is unfortunate that Dart had no access to skulls of infant chimpanzees, gorillas or orangs of an age corresponding to that of the Taung skull, for had such material been available he would have realised that the posture and poise of the head, the shape of the jaws, and many details of the nose, face and cranium upon which he relied for proof of his contention that Australopithecus was nearly akin to man, were essentially identical with the conditions in the infant gorilla and chimpanzee’.

Dart never recovered from these attacks. Not only scientific colleagues but popular opinion veered against him. The Taung child became little more than a music-hall joke. Disheartened by this turn of events, Dart buried himself in university work. When the university authorities offered him the opportunity to travel to Europe to show his prize specimen to scientists there and to compare it with other known fossils, he declined to go. Nor did he make any attempt to search for an adult Australopithecus at Taung or at other limestone mines to bolster his case.

Moreover, the flurry of interest in the Taung child was soon overtaken by news of a significant discovery in China. Palaeontologists working in an abandoned lime quarry at Chou K’ou Tien (now Zhoukoudian), a village forty miles from Beijing, uncovered hominid remains that became known as ‘Peking Man’, adding weight to the theory that Asia, not Africa, was the cradle of humankind. A distinguished American scientist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, was convinced of the matter and steered large sums of money towards research in Asia. In a book published in 1927, Man Rises to Parnassus, Osborn made not a single reference to Dart, Taung or Australopithecus africanus. Not only was Dart’s child the wrong creature; it was in the wrong part of the world.

When members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science visited South Africa in 1929, Dart’s hopes that they would take an interest in the Taung child were soon dashed. ‘Although some examined and made non-committal comments’, he recalled, ‘it was obvious that few regarded it as anything of real importance in the evolutionary story’.

Dart made one last attempt to persuade the scientific establishment of the validity of the Taung child. In 1931, six years after he had first set eyes on it, he brought the skull to London, hoping for a more favourable reception. But he found the London experts—Keith, Elliot Smith and Smith Woodward—far more preoccupied with Peking Man than interested in listening to his arguments. Elliot Smith, who had recently returned from China, was brimming with enthusiasm about the discoveries there. Dart was nevertheless invited to share a platform with Elliot Smith at a meeting of the Zoological Society of London in February.

With Smith Woodward in the chair, Elliot Smith led off with a masterly account of the Peking Man discoveries, enlivened by lantern slides and casts. Dart’s heart sank: he had neither slides nor casts, only the tiny skull of Australopithecus africanus cradled in his hands.

I stood in that austere and chilly room, my heart bounding with the hope that the expressions of polite attention on the four score faces before me might change to vivid interest as I spoke. I realized that my offering was an anti-climax ...

My address became increasingly diffident as I realized the inadequacy of my material and took in the unchanged expressions of my audience.

Further disappointment followed. Dart had arrived in London with high hopes that the Royal Society would publish a 300-page monograph he had written on the Taung child. But Elliot Smith informed him that only a section of it on dentition would be accepted. Rather than agree to such cuts, Dart took the monograph back with him to South Africa, abandoning plans to have it published.

The final blow came later in 1931, when Keith published his book New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man, in which he devoted an entire chapter to demolishing Dart’s claims about the Taung child. In Britain, Keith’s verdict was regarded as being the last word on the matter.

Demoralised and defeated, Dart lost all interest in palaeoanthropology, gave up work on fossils for many years and subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. The Taung child, meanwhile, lay forgotten on the desk of one of his colleagues in the medical school.