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Dart, Raymond (1893–1988) South African Anatomist,
Anthropologist Raymond Dart made some of the most
famous early discoveries of fossils of extinct human ancestors.
Born on February 4, 1893, Dart grew up in
Queensland, Australia, where his family raised cattle. His
excellent studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane
allowed him to begin medical studies in Sydney. He
went to England to join a medical corps in World War I.
When the war ended, one of the world’s leading neuroanatomists,
Grafton Elliot Smith, accepted Dart into graduate
study at the University of Manchester. In 1922 Dart joined
the faculty of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg,
South Africa, as a professor of anatomy. Dart
displayed brilliance but also challenged many orthodox
opinions of his peers. He worked hard to build up the university
facilities for the study of anatomy.
Dart’s interest in anatomy extended to fossils. In 1924,
a fossil baboon skull was found at a limestone quarry at
Taung. Dart examined a specimen from this quarry, and
spent a month removing the minerals from the specimen. It
turned out to be the fossil face and jaw of a young primate,
now known as the Taung Child (see australopithecines).
Dart immediately recognized that the fossil may represent
an animal intermediate between apes and humans.
He quickly wrote a paper for Nature which described this
species and named it Australopithecus africanus (“Southern
ape from Africa”). Scientists in Britain did not believe
that this species was anything other than an ape. This
was partly because the leading anthropologists of the day
(including Grafton Elliot Smith) considered the English
Piltdown man to be the ancestor of humans and therefore
concluded that humans evolved in Europe, not Africa. In
fact, the Taung specimen, having an apelike skull and teeth
that resembled those of modern humans, seemed difficult to
reconcile with the human skull and apelike jaw of Piltdown
man. Almost the only scholar who supported Dart was the
Scottish doctor and paleontologist Robert Broom. When
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Dart finally traveled to London in 1930 to try to convince
anthropologists of the legitimacy of the Taung skull, he was
overshadowed by the recent discovery of Peking man (see
Homo erectus). Giving up the fossil hunting for many
years, Dart concentrated on teaching and administration at
the university.
Broom discovered many more australopithecine fossils
in South Africa. As more fossils accumulated, many scientists
finally accepted australopithecines as possible human ancestors.
Encouraged, Dart resumed fossil hunting. At Makapansgat,
Dart found fossils which he named Australopithecus
prometheus, in the erroneous belief that their blackened state
indicated the use of fire (Prometheus was the Greek mythological
figure who gave humans fire). These specimens are
now considered to be A. africanus.
Dart is perhaps most famous for his “killer ape” theory.
He claimed that, even though they did not make stone tools
or weapons, the australopithecines used bones, teeth, and
horn as weapons and were bloodthirsty killers. If modern
humans are their descendants, then Homo sapiens must have
inherited these violent tendencies. This idea was popularized
by writers such as Robert Ardrey in his 1961 book African
Genesis. The Dart theory is the inspiration behind the opening
scene of the 1968 movie version of Arthur C. Clarke’s
2001: A Space Odyssey. Subsequent fossil discoveries, notably
by anthropologist C. K. Brain, showed that the australopithecines
were not the hunters but the prey, and that the
killer ape theory was wrong.
Even though he erred about the killer apes, Dart made a
vital contribution to the study of human evolution: He demonstrated
that Darwin had been right in speculating that Africa
was the place where humans evolved (see Darwin, Charles;
Descent of man [book]). The genus that Dart named is
still considered almost certainly to be the ancestor of modern
humankind, even though the species that Dart discovered
was most likely a side-branch of human evolution. Dart died
November 22, 1988.