No longer a bone of contention

Press, 7 May 1983, Page 19

No longer a bone of contention

A card sent for his 90th birthday by friends, former students, and colleagues in the United States sums up Raymond Dart’s controversial career. The card shows a dog looking at a bone and saying: “It’s no longer considered for any practical purposes to be anyone’s bone of contention.” Dart has lived long enough to see accepted his contention that a skull he named Australopithecus Africanus in 1925 was a pre-human form of man — an ape-like creature with human characteristics often called the missing link. His assembling of the skull was the first confirmation of Charles Darwin’s prediction that Africa would prove to be the cradle of mankind, and was considered evidence supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution. Dart, born on February 4, 1893, in Brisbane, Australia, says: “Circumstances thrust anthropology upon me. I had no sense of dedication to a search for human ancestors. I have always tried to avoid both bones and mathematics.” The fledgling medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg needed bones for a museum so that the students would be able to differentiate between human bones and those that were not human, he recalls. He asked students to bring him baboon bones. One student brought in a. piece of skull that had been used as a paperweight by a mining official. Dart realised the skull was unusual and asked a geologist to send him any more fossil remains he could find. He was sent a boxload of bones

encased in rock from a cave on the fringes of the Kalahari desert. It took him six weeks to assemble the skull now known as the taung skull. “It was a young creature. It wasn’t full grown, but its brain was bigger than that of any chimpanzee,” he says. The skull also had human-like teeth. The carbon-dating system had not been discovered then, and Dart had to rely on his knowledge of anatomy and evidence that the skull had come from age-old rocks. Now it is believed that Australopithecus Africanus lived more than one million years ago, and possibly as long as four million years ago, Dart says. For years critics said the skull was from a chimpanzee. Religious groups who objected to the theory of evolution denounced Dart. However, his later work, and the discoveries of Robert Broom at Sterkfontein, in South Africa, and L. S. B. Leakey and Richard Leakey, in East Africa, confirmed his theories. “Dart is the grand old man of fossil-man research,” says Donald J. Ortner, curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. “His early observations on the evolutionary significance of Australopithecus Africanus were highly controversial at the time he made them, but since then have generally been accepted.” Richard Leakey, whose father, L. S. B. Leakey, was a rival of Dart, says: “He is the last of a generation of pioneers in paleanthropology,

and his contributions in the 1920 s and 1930 s must remain a landmark in the studies of our ancestors.” The L. S. B. Leakey Foundation honoured Dart in 1973 for his work, and the University of the Witwatersrand created the institute for the study of man in Africa to further his work. Dart graduated from the Sydney University Medical School in 1917. After serving in the Australian Army Medical Corps during the First World War, he moved to London. Friends persuaded him to apply for the chair of anatomy at Witwatersrand. He got the job and held the chair from 1923 to 1958, as well as serving as dean of the medical faculty for 18 years. Since 1966, he has worked part-time at the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia as a visiting professor. Dart says he believes scientists now are looking in the wrong direction — out into space. “We must first look back. If we are to understand the complexity of what we are, we must have a complete record of what we have been,” he says. “I believe that when mankind becomes concerned about itself and its being, it will solve problems which governments and wars never win.” Dart, who has lost central vision of his eyes, making reading difficult, adds: “I think I must be a nuisance. It must be terrible fo younger men who have to go on to make their own reputations to have me still hanging around.”

From

ROBERT WELLER,

Associated

Press, in Johannesburg