The Enigma of Raymond Dart
by Robin Denicourt
International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2
2009
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Dart has entered the literature as one of the great scholar-scientists of the era… the brilliance and accuracy of Dart's claim… Dart had become a hero in South Africa, and the boldness and originality of his work, built his reputation as one of the great figures in interpreting the human record. The conventional image in print is of a scientist ahead of his time, with a major breakthrough that took two decades for the world to recognize… Raymond Dart was born in Brisbane, Australia -- dramatically so, during the flooding of the town in 1893… Dart was clearly an outstanding student… Dart's career in Johannesburg fulfilled a valuable role in developing medical teaching… the Australopithecus article that marked him for international fame… the bold statement that it represented "an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man ... an extinct link between man and his simian ancestor”… a rare confidence… remarkable on two grounds… the high reputation that Dart had gained… Of course Dart was not the only scientist of his generation to identify distinct racial groups… wild hypotheses seem not to have damaged his credibility in palaeoanthropology where his critics evaluated his views on their own terms… As the holder of a chair in anatomy, he had to be taken more seriously in writing on the physical anthropology of African peoples… We now know, of course, that a complex network of Indian Ocean trade has linked the African farming communities of the east African coast to the wider world for more than two millennia… the Swaziland research did make one claim that would last: that for the early first-millennium origins of the Iron Age in southern Africa …. interpretation also needs to go beyond that of Saul Dubow's discussion of Dart and "scientific racism...Dart may have lagged behind some of the challenges and changes to the established approaches in physical anthropology, but he had not been responsible for creating them. "Scientific racism" is not inevitably associated with practical racial discrimination. Dart though never actively political is credited with opening the Wits Medical School to non-white students, and with criticising discriminatory policies. Early in his South African years he stated publicly there was no justification in biology for intolerance on racial grounds… In the apartheid era, Dart's followers could comfortably distance themselves from the most extreme racial paradigms and Dart could concentrate on different topics such as the osteodontokeratic… Dart's enthusiasm for exotic origins and links in the past of the African continent, especially his challenge to the African origins of Great Zimbabwe, reinforced white prejudices and was echoed in Southern African white communities well into the 1970s. Isolated from European culture at the furthest end of a vast continent, historical links to ancient Mediterranean civilizations were immensely reassuring… young academic institutions of the dominions needed to demonstrate their strengths. The Australian Dart helped put South African science on the world map, and scientific achievement on the Southern African map… An element here might be the brashness of the outsider to a world of science dominated by metropolitan Europe: the independent Australian character…maverick … Part of the explanation for Dart's approach is the baleful influence of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith… If Elliot Smith was a major influence on Dart seeking to create a reputation in anthropology and archaeology, Phillip Tobias was a major influence on maintaining that reputation through and beyond the last decades of Dart's life. Because of the high regard in which Tobias has been held -- and continues to be held -- his championing and defence of the Dart reputation has had real impact… some of Dart's continuing influence must be attributed to his personal charm and charisma alongside the awe in which he was held… it is not impossible that a second of his many adventurous hypotheses might in time be seen as an inspired guess matching a newly accepted argument…. Even recently interpretations of population movements from (and at times into) the African continent have conveniently ignored geographical limitations and boundaries and the principle of Occam's Razor, to support complex explanatory models…. We have referred to the distance drawn by Glyn Daniel between scientific archaeology and "the lunatic fringe" as if there is a clear line applicable at all times…. There are problems with such a simple approach… This seems too simplistic and pious a division between good and bad, science and pseudo-science, us and them. There are many examples in which the rational and the irrational coexist. We are frequently reminded how Isaac Newton was an enthusiast for astrology while laying the basis for scientific physics; that while Conan Doyle defined the epitomy of rationality and logic in his detective novels his greatest passion was for the spiritualist movement; and in seeing how many contemporary leaders of scientific research attest to an unwavering fundamental religious faith coexisting with their research methodology… Dart was a distinguished (if at times eccentric) teacher. His descriptive anatomy appears robust, though not free from criticism… He could have maintained a career involving contributions restricted to formal anatomy. But he chose to dip into unfamiliar worlds… In the division of scientific from non-scientific method, one may argue that the "discovery" of Australopithecus was not methodologically a scientific discovery but a fortunate stumbling on the truth. It is good to remember scholars for their lasting contribution to our knowledge, but we need to be aware that the process of creating that knowledge is not always clear, clean, and, methodologically sound.
-- The Enigma of Raymond Dart, by Robin Denicourt
Apologist: a person who makes a defense in speech or writing of a belief, idea, etc.; one of the authors of the early Christian apologies in defense of the faith.
-- Apologist, by Dictionary.com
Introduction
Raymond Dart (l89l-1988) is famous for the 1925 discovery of the Taung cranium from South Africa he named Australopithecus africanus, and its identification as the first support for Darwin's hypothesis of the African ancestry of mankind. Dart's claims, first rejected, were later seen as one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. This formed one surviving part of a substantial corpus of wild claims made in Dart's writings. These included the taming of fire; the osteodontokeratic; cannibalism and the killer ape; Boskop man; work on racial origins; on exotic invaders into southern Africa from the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, and China; on phallic symbols; and Stone Age miners.
Dart's career and work presents the intriguing circumstance of a scientist and writer who challenged science with a daring proposal which was considered false and was later fully accepted as scientifically valid, and used his reputation to forward numerous arguments which could not stand up to scientific scrutiny.1
Almost every survey of world prehistory, the "origins of mankind," or the history of palaeoanthropology and archaeology includes Dart's 1925 achievement. Through this discovery, Dart has entered the literature as one of the great scholar-scientists of the era.
Dart's claims were described later that year in Nature by a leader in the field, Sir Arthur Keith, as "preposterous,"2 a view echoed by other researchers. It would take until after the discovery of the Transvaal Australopithecines in the later 1930s before the scientific community began to acknowledge the brilliance and accuracy of Dart's claim, and it was the mid 1940s before the major critics stepped back. But already by that date Dart had become a hero in South Africa, and the boldness and originality of his work, built his reputation as one of the great figures in interpreting the human record. The conventional image in print is of a scientist ahead of his time, with a major breakthrough that took two decades for the world to recognize.
It is therefore ironic that in a very productive career of writing, together with numerous public presentations, the majority of themes and arguments that Dart pursued in archaeology and physical anthropology could indeed be described as "preposterous" -- clearly so in terms of today's knowledge, but many running directly against the methodology, knowledge, and scientific understanding of his own time. While Dart's description of Australopithecus seems methodologically scientific, his analysis was one of many interpretations in his body of work made with less than strictly scientific methodology, but one that proved sustainable through the later scientific research of others.
Most current references to Dart's role are brief and reverential.3 This paper seeks to interpret the enigma of a scientist who doggedly pursued numerous lines of argument seen as false and misguided, but one of which -- the identification of Australopithecus africanus -- has created his lasting reputation. The career of Raymond Dart, and the fate of his views, raise questions about the nature of science in early twentieth-century "colonial" culture and the particular world of white South Africa's emerging ideologies. We argue that the phenomena of Dart's broad-ranging hypotheses in archaeology, biological anthropology and beyond do not have a single cause. They reflect the intersection of his personality, his own non-metropolitan background, his eccentric influences, and the interpretative models of the inter-war period (especially on race), with a white South Africa that embraced the opportunity for a new role in world science alongside specific ideological needs to reinforce social structure and identity. They also serve to raise questions about the boundary between science and pseudoscience.
"Man of Grit"
Raymond Dart was born in Brisbane, Australia -- dramatically so, during the flooding of the town in 1893. Attending Ipswich Grammar School, he initially followed his family's strongly religious and fundamentalist views, and decided to become a medical missionary. However, before moving to study medicine at Sydney University, he accepted a scholarship to study science at the University of Queensland and here, brought into contact with both zoology and geology, he moved away from his fundamentalist assumptions and changed his worldview, seeing "the discrepancies between Fundamentalism and the facts"4 and accepting an evolutionary model.
He continued to Sydney University in 1914 to study for his medical degree. A resident of St Andrew's College, his contemporaries included another great Australian in the history of archaeology, Vere Gordon Childe (a tutor at the college whose radical views led to opposition that forced his resignation) and the future Australian Labor foreign minister and UN pioneer H.V. Evatt, with whom Dart wrote a student article.
At the very start of his medical studies Dart was able to attend the 1914 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Sydney. Here he heard the (Australian born) Grafton Elliot Smith (1871- 1937), whose reputation as a distinguished anatomist is accompanied by his infamy (to archaeologists) as a leading proponent of hyper-diffusionism, of which Glyn Daniel has written "why does the world tolerate this academic rubbish?"5
Hyperdiffusionism is a pseudoarchaeological hypothesis suggesting that certain historical technologies or ideas originated with a single people or civilization before their adoption by other cultures. Thus, all great civilizations that share similar cultural practices, such as construction of pyramids, derived them from a single common progenitor.According to its proponents, examples of hyperdiffusion can be found in religious practices, cultural technologies, megalithic monuments, and lost ancient civilizations.
The idea of hyperdiffusionism differs in several ways from trans-cultural diffusion, one being that hyperdiffusionism is usually not testable due to its pseudo-scientific nature. Additionally, unlike trans-cultural diffusion, hyperdiffusionism does not use trading and cultural networks to explain the expansion of a society within a single culture; instead, hyperdiffusionists claim that all major cultural innovations and societies derive from one (usually lost) ancient civilization. Ergo, the Tucson artifacts derive from Ancient Rome, carried by the "Romans who came across the Atlantic and then overland to Arizona;" this is believed because the artifacts resembled known ancient Roman artifacts.
Mainstream archeologists regard the hydrodiffusionism hypothesis as pseudoarchaeology.
-- Hyperdiffusionism in archaeology, by Wikipedia
Elliot Smith became a crucial influence on Dart's career, providing him with opportunities for employment but powerfully idiosyncratic outlooks on human prehistory. Dart attributed to Elliot Smith his leaning towards these interests, noting in 1929 that "anthropology in recent years has received a great stimulus through the "Diffusionist theory" of Elliot Smith relative to cultures.''6
Dart was clearly an outstanding student. He took on a job of University Demonstrator in 1917 while still studying, but with the Great War still being fought, in 1918 he joined the army as a Captain (aged twenty-five), his ship stopping off at Durban and Cape Town to give him a first sight of South Africa where he was to spend most of his life. As the war ended soon after Dart's arrival in London, he stayed to take up a position as Elliot Smith's assistant at University College London, teaching anatomy but also beginning a program of research in medicine that could have led his reputation in a quite different direction, While in London, Dart was able to examine in 1922 the Broken Hill fossil from Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe in Zambia), which had been found the previous year.7
It was to Elliot Smith that Dart owed the appointment that made his career and life in South Africa, In January 1923 -- aged only twenty-nine -- he moved to South Africa to take up the position of full professor of anatomy in the medical school of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (the university had received its charter in 1922), which was to be his home for the next sixty-five years until his death in 1988 at the age of ninety, five. He long remained active in writing, public presentations of his work and support of research that followed his own enthusiasms, with fieldwork privately funded through the Bernard Price Institute of Palaeontological Research (founded 1945) and other bodies.
Taung and Australopithecus
Dart's career in Johannesburg fulfilled a valuable role in developing medical teaching -- he was dean and head of the medical school for eighteen years, However there was a major shift in his research interests. As he was to explain:
The abysmal lack of equipment and literature found me to develop an interest in other subjects, particularly anthropology, for which Elliot Smith had fired my imagination.8
He added that "here in Johannesburg, as with Elliot Smith in Cairo, bones had to be studied instead of brains. Physical anthropological issues screamed for initiation in this stupendous continent of Africa."9
Of Dart's papers published in 1974,10 a broad categorization suggests topics in medicine and anatomy numbered five out of six to 1923, seven out of thirteen to 1924, but only 5 percent (twenty-four papers) to 1974, compared to fifty-nine in physical anthropology and ninety-four in archaeology.
His first paper in this area11 was on "Boskop man," a topic we consider further below, and he completed several papers in archaeology and physical anthropology before the Australopithecus article that marked him for international fame.
The story of the discovery of the Taung skull is well known and is now part of the history, even the folklore, of studies of early man. In brief, Dart encouraged his students to collect fossils, and one of these students, Josephine Salmons, brought in a fossilized baboon skull found at a lime works quarry in Taung(s) in the then northern Cape Province (today's North West Province). Dart showed this to geologist colleague R.B. Young who arranged for further samples of bone-bearing breccia to be brought from Taung. It was one of those that contained the famous Taung child skull.
The timetable of events has been reconstructed by Tobias.12 The breccia containing the skull was handed to Dart on 28 November 1924, and he began work on 1 December to free the fossil from the rock. The South African teaching year had already finished for the summer, and fortunately this year Dart was not involved in external examining. The cleaning process took three weeks and was completed around 23 December, but clearly during the physical procedure Dart developed his unambiguous hypothesis that this was an early hominid, quite different from any found to date in Africa and evidence to support Darwin's hypothesis of the African origins of man. In another seventeen days he completed his description, comparison, analysis, the naming of Australopithecus africanus, and the bold statement that it represented "an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man ... an extinct link between man and his simian ancestor." The article was despatched together with its illustrations on 6 January 1925 (six weeks after the arrival of the find) to catch the boat to England; it reached the editor of Nature on 30 January and with the initial encouragement of Keith and other scholars -- the "refereeing" seems to have been by telephone13 -- Nature published it on 7 February 1925.14 Indeed, Dart responded to local journalistic nquiries certain that the paper would be published in Nature by that date.
Such a process implies a rare confidence. Solly Zuckerman assessing this event wrote sarcastically of the "fossil ape-like skull which, presumably by divine guidance, Dart immediately recognized as the 'missing link' ..."15 and was skeptical that one could use purely visual impressions for a diagnosis of relationships of animal bones. The hypothesis was remarkable on two grounds. There was no reliable stratigraphic dating to provide a chronological framework for the find. Indeed this has remained a problem16; Dart quotes identifications of the limeworks deposit as "probably Pieistocene"17 though he had thought it Pliocene.18 The ancestral claim was primarily on morphological grounds and, since this was the skull of a child of about 5 years, the more difficult for comparative purposes. Further, the location, in the open dry lands of South Africa, contrasted starkly with the forest environment of Africa's great apes that had inspired Darwin's 1871 prophesy about the African origins of man.
In the cautious scientific world of the twenty-first century it is instructive to note this accelerated time scale of the exercise that led to the discovery and announcement of Austrolopithecus. It makes an interesting contrast with the timetable for the announcement of the most important and exciting recent hominin discovery, that of Homo floresiensis. There the key skeletal material was discovered in early August 2003, and the scientific study began on 22 September 2003. 19 The definitive articles reporting these finds were sent and received by Nature on 3 March 2004 (only five-and-a-half months later, held up to await additional dating evidence). They were reviewed that month positively but with recommendations for additional information, analyses, and CT scans that led to further work on the material. The revisions of the two articles were resubmilted and accepted on 18 August and 8 September -- but only published on 28 October 2004 as Morwood noted, one year, one month, and one week after the analysis began.20
In Nature a week after Dart's announcement, the four leading British scholars in the field commented on the claims: Keith, Elliot Smith, Smith Woodward and Duckworth.21 In general they praised Dart's description of the material but put on hold their acceptance of his claims and classification while awaiting the full publication of the material. Keith doubted the creation of a new family, seeing Australopithecus as the same genus or sub-family as the chimpanzee and gorilla, and noted the need for geological evidence to settle its relationship. Elliot Smith too grouped the find with the African great apes and sought geological dating.
Doubts continued to be expressed about the claims made by Dart, and those who had supported their publication began to distance themselves from his conclusions. Most startlingly Sir Arthur Keith, once he had studied casts of the finds in London, wrote in Nature in July 1925: "An examination of the casts exhibited at Wembley will satisfy zoologists that [Dart's] claim is preposterous,"22 He was referring specifically to Dart's claim for a new family and a position intermediate between living anthropoids and man.
"Preposterous" is a strong word in science. It should be remembered that at this time Keith was a leading proponent of the role of Piltdown Man, even if one rejects suggestions that he was directly implicated in the fake.23
A skull, a supposedly very ancient skull, long used as one of the most powerful pieces of evidence documenting the Darwinian position upon human evolution, has been proven to be a forgery, a hoax perpetrated by an unscrupulous but learned amateur. In the fall of 1953 the famous Piltdown cranium, known in scientific circles all over the world since its discovery in a gravel pit on the Sussex Downs in 1911, was jocularly dismissed by the world's press as the skull that had "made monkeys out of the anthropologists." Nobody remembered in 1953 that Wallace, the great evolutionist, had protested to a friend in 1913, "The Piltdown skull does not prove much, if anything!"
Why had Wallace made that remark? Why, almost alone among the English scientists of his time, had he chosen to regard with a dubious eye a fossil specimen that seemed to substantiate the theory to which he and Darwin had devoted their lives? He did so for one reason: he did not believe what the Piltdown skull appeared to reveal as to the nature of the process by which the human brain had been evolved. He did not believe in a skull which had a modern brain box attached to an apparently primitive face and given, in the original estimates, an antiquity of something over a million years...
The Piltdown hoaxer, in attaching an ape jaw to a human skull fragment, had, perhaps unwittingly, created a creature which supported the Darwinian idea of man, not too unlike the man of today, extending far back into pre-Ice Age times...
Today Piltdown is gone. In its place we are confronted with the blunt statement of two modern scientists, M. R. A. Chance and A. P. Mead.
"No adequate explanation," they confess over eighty years after Darwin scrawled his vigorous "No!" upon Wallace's paper, "has been put forward to account for so large a cerebrum as that found in man."
We have been so busy tracing the tangible aspects of evolution in the forms of animals that our heads, the little globes which hold the midnight sky and the shining, invisible universes of thought, have been taken about as much for granted as the growth of a yellow pumpkin in the fall.
Now a part of this mystery as it is seen by the anthropologists of today lies in the relation of the brain to time. "If," Wallace had said, "researches in all parts of Europe and Asia fail to bring to light any proofs of man's presence far back in the Age of Mammals, it will be at least a presumption that he came into existence at a much later date and by a more rapid process of development.'" If human evolution should prove to be comparatively rapid, "explosive" in other words, Wallace felt that his position would be vindicated, because such a rapid development of the brain would, he thought, imply a divinely directed force at work in man. In the 1870's when he wrote, however, human prehistory was largely an unknown blank. Today we can make a partial answer to Wallace's question. Since the exposure of the Piltdown hoax all of the evidence at our command -- and it is considerable -- points to man, in his present form, as being one of the youngest and newest of all earth's swarming inhabitants.
The Ice Age extends behind us in time for, at most, a million years. Though this may seem long to one who confines his studies to the written history of man, it is, in reality, a very short period as the student of evolution measures time. It is a period marked more by the extinction of some of the last huge land animals, like the hairy mammoth and the saber- toothed tiger, than it is by the appearance of new forms of life. To this there is only one apparent exception: the rise and spread of man over the Old World land mass.
Most of our knowledge of him--even in his massive-faced, beetle-browed stage--is now confined, since the loss of Piltdown, to the last half of the Ice Age. [f we pass backward beyond this point we can find traces of crude tools, stone implements which hint that some earlier form of man was present here and there in Europe, Asia, and particularly Africa in the earlier half of Ice Age time, but to the scientist it is like peering into the mists floating over an unknown landscape. Here and there through the swirling vapor one catches a glimpse of a shambling figure, or a half-wild primordial face stares back at one from some momentary opening in the fog. Then, just as one grasps at a clue, the long gray twilight settles in and the wraiths and the half-heard voices pass away.
Nevertheless, particularly in Africa, a remarkable group of human-like apes have been discovered: creatures with small brains and teeth of a remarkably human cast. Prominent scientists are still debating whether they are on the direct line of ascent to man or are merely near relatives of ours. Some, it is now obvious, existed too late in time to be our true ancestors, though this does not mean that their bodily characters may not tell us what the earliest anthropoids who took the human turn of the road were like.
These apes are not all similar in type or appearance. They are men and yet not men. Some are frailer-bodied, some have great, bone-cracking jaws and massive gorilloid crests atop their skulls. This fact leads us to another of Wallace's remarkable perceptions of long ago. With the rise of the truly human brain, Wallace saw that man had transferred to his machines and tools many of the alterations of parts that in animals take place through evolution of the body. Unwittingly, man had assigned to his machines the selective evolution which in the animal changes the nature of its bodily structure through the ages. Man of today, the atomic manipulator, the aeronaut who flies faster than sound, has precisely the same brain and body as his ancestors of twenty thousand years ago who painted the last Ice Age mammoths on the walls of caves in France.
To put it another way, it is man's ideas that have evolved and changed the world about him. Now, confronted by the lethal radiations of open space and the fantastic speeds of his machines, he has to invent new electronic controls that operate faster than his nerves, and he must shield his naked body against atomic radiation by the use of protective metals. Already he is physically antique in this robot world he has created. All that sustains him is that small globe of gray matter through which spin his ever-changing conceptions of the universe.
Yet, as Wallace, almost a hundred years ago, glimpsed this timeless element in man, he uttered one more prophecy. When we come to trace out history into the past, he contended, sooner or later we will come to a time when the body of man begins to differ and diverge more extravagantly in its appearance. Then, he wrote, we shall know that we stand close to the starting point of the human family. In the twilight before the dawn of the human mind, man will not have been able to protect his body from change and his remains will bear the marks of all the forces that play upon the rest of life. He will be different in his form. He will be, in other words, as variable in body as we know the South African man-apes to be.
Today, with the solution of the Piltdown enigma, we must settle the question of the time involved in human evolution in favor of Wallace, not Darwin; we need not, however, pursue the mystical aspects of Wallace's thought -- since other factors yet to be examined may well account for the rise of man. The rapid fading out of archaeological evidence of tools in lower Ice Age times -- along with the discovery of man-apes of human aspect but with ape-sized brains, yet possessing a diverse array of bodily characters -- suggests that the evolution of the human brain was far more rapid than that conceived of in early Darwinian circles. At that time it was possible to hear the Eskimos spoken of as possible survivals of Miocene men of several million years ago. By contrast to this point of view, man and his rise now appear short in time -- explosively short. There is every reason to believe that whatever the nature of the forces involved in the production of the human brain, a long slow competition of human group with human group or race with race would not have resulted in such similar mental potentialities among all peoples everywhere. Something -- some other factor -- has escaped our scientific attention.
There are certain strange bodily characters which mark man as being more than the product of a dog-eat-dog competition with his fellows. He possesses a peculiar larval nakedness, difficult to explain on survival principles; his periods of helpless infancy and childhood are prolonged; he has aesthetic impulses which, though they vary in intensity from individual to individual -- appear in varying manifestations among all peoples. He is totally dependent, in the achievement of human status, upon the careful training he receives in human society.
Unlike a solitary species of animal, he cannot develop alone. He has suffered a major loss of precise instinctive controls of behavior. To make up for this biological lack, society and parents condition the infant, supply his motivations, and promote his long-drawn training at the difficult task of becoming a normal human being. Even today some individuals fail to make this adjustment and have to be excluded from society.
We are now in a position to see the wonder and terror of the human predicament: man is totally dependent on society. Creature of dream, he has created an invisible world of ideas, beliefs, habits, and customs which buttress him about and replace for him the precise instincts of the lower creatures. In this invisible universe he takes refuge, but just as instinct may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man's cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation, or, on an individual level, the confused mind may substitute, by some terrible alchemy, cruelty for love.
The profound shock of the leap from animal to human status is echoing still in the depths of our subconscious minds. It is a transition which would seem to have demanded considerable rapidity of adjustment in order for human beings to have survived, and it also involved the growth of prolonged bonds of affection in the subhuman family, because otherwise its naked, helpless offspring would have perished.
It is not beyond the range of possibility that this strange reduction of instincts in man in some manner forced a precipitous brain growth as a compensation -- something that had to be hurried for survival purposes. Man's competition, it would thus appear, may have been much less with his own kind than with the dire necessity of building about him a world of ideas to replace his lost animal environment. As we will show later, he is a pedomorph, a creature with an extended childhood.
Modern science would go on to add that many of the characters of man, such as his lack of fur, thin skull, and globular head, suggest mysterious changes in growth rates which preserve, far into human maturity, foetal or infantile characters which hint that the forces creating man drew him fantastically out of the very childhood of his brutal forerunners. Once more the words of Wallace come back to haunt us: "We may safely infer that the savage possesses a brain capable, if cultivated and developed, of performing work of a kind and degree far beyond what he ever requires it to do."...
Ironically enough, science, which can show us the flints and the broken skulls of our dead fathers, has yet to explain how we have come so far so fast, nor has it any completely satisfactory answer to the question asked by Wallace long ago. Those who would revile us by pointing to an ape at the foot of our family tree grasp little of the awe with which the modern scientist now puzzles over man's lonely and supreme ascent. As one great student of paleoneurology, Dr. Tilly Edinger, recently remarked, "If man has passed through a Pithecanthropus phase, the evolution of his brain has been unique, not only in its result but also in its tempo .... Enlargement of the cerebral hemispheres by 50 per cent seems to have taken place, speaking geologically, within an instant, and without having been accompanied by any major increase in body size."
The true secret of Piltdown, though thought by the public to be merely the revelation of an unscrupulous forgery, lies in the fact that it has forced science to reexamine carefully the history of the most remarkable creation in the world -- the human brain.
-- The Real Secret of Piltdown, from "The Immense Journey," by Loren Eiseley
The expansion of the human brain during evolution, specifically of the neocortex, is linked to our cognitive abilities such as reasoning and language. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden have been studying a gene called ARHGAP11B for many years. This gene is found only in humans and triggers an increased production of brain stem cells – a prerequisite for a larger brain. Together with colleagues at the Central Institute for Experimental Animals (CIEA) in Kawasaki and the Keio University in Tokyo, both located in Japan, they could now show that this human-specific gene, when expressed to physiological levels, causes an enlarged neocortex in the common marmoset, a non-human primate. This suggests that the ARHGAP11B gene may have indeed caused neocortex expansion during human evolution.
-- Evolutionary key for a bigger brain: Dresden and Japanese researchers show that a human-specific brain size gene causes a larger neocortex in the common marmoset, a non-human primate, by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
And it was Keith who was to publish a detailed account of the Australopithecus skull, leaving Dart's own monograph unpublished.24 Dart issued a shorter description of the teeth but his further publications on the find were mainly about its significance, rather than more detailed scientific studies.
What confirmed Dart's claims was the discovery of further Australopithecines by Robert Broom and others in the southern Transvaal cave sites of South Africa from the mid 1930s onwards. These gave support to the hypothesis generated from Dart's single, juvenile, undated skull, and confirmed in the wider scientific world the high reputation that Dart had gained among his local South African supporters. W. Le Gros Clark was influential in securing acceptance at the Pan African Congress of Prehistory in 1947, and that year Sir Arthur Keith formally acknowledged Dart's claim.25 Only in 1959 would Dart release (co-authored with Dennis Craig) his book length public account of the achievement of discovering, identifying, and defending the claims for Australopithecus at Taung.
Makapansgat and the Taming of Fire
Dart re-entered the area of detailed scientific work on Australopithecus with the finds at Makapansgat, in the northern Transvaal. Indeed, only five months after the Taung announcement, Dart noted the apparent presence of carbon in bone assemblages from the site and stated ''there seems little doubt from the evidence available that the bone-bed is the 'kitchen-midden' result of human occupation at a remote epoch."26 But it was over two decades before he could test this bold statement. In a field project initially led by Phillip Tobias (who would become Dart's protege), and continued under Dart's staff, Australopithecine fossils were discovered from 1947 onwards and described in great detail (and without challenge) by Dart in a series of technical articles. Ironically he first ascribed them to a species different from both the Taung and the southern Transvaal sites, as Australopithecus prometheus. This pattern of a new species for a new find is typical of the fate that has befallen many hominin fossil finds at the hands of their discoverers.27 Dart is also widely credited with suggesting the name habilis for Homo habilis.28 In due course the Makapansgat finds would be considered by most scientists to belong to the same species as the Taung child, A. africanus.
Dart's named his hominid finds as A. prometheus because he saw the use of fire as another skill of the early hominid community. Some of the vertebrate bones from the site were considered to contain free carbon, which he attributed to the deliberate use of fire by human predators:
The special significance of the Makapansgat valley limeworks deposits in unravelling these early human mysteries lies in their being true hearths and thus providing information ... concerning man's hunting skill, his probable weapons and his use of fire.29
Subsequent research and discussion has not supported Dart's claim for the human use of fire by Australopithecus at Makapansgat, or indeed for the presence of fire, and at least some of the blackening has been explained by manganese.30 While there is still active debate about the dates for the first controlled use of fire, the claims for Makapansgat are not even considered.31 In due course Dart seems to have backtracked on his certainty here.32
More strangely, Tobias has stated33 that Dart's confidence in the hominid source of fire at Makapansgat had persuaded him to identify a fossil baboon skull as Australopithecus prometheus two years before the actual Australopithecus was found, and to write a paper for this claim which he withdrew before publication.
It was, however, the Makapansgat site which led to one of Dart's most controversial claims, that of the Osteodontokeratic.