Raymond Dart; He Discovered ‘Missing Link’ in Evolution

Raymond A. Dart, the esteemed anthropologist whose discovery of the fossilized skull of a young humanoid more than 60 years ago provided a “missing link” between ape and man, is dead.

The anatomist who revolutionized the concept of human origins and substantiated Charles Darwin’s prediction that Africa would someday prove to be the cradle of mankind was 95.

He died of a brain hemorrhage Tuesday at a clinic near Johannesburg, said a colleague from the University of the Witwatersrand, Prof. Phillip Tobias, himself an internationally acclaimed anatomist.

1925 Breakthrough

Dart came to the world’s attention in 1925 with his announced discovery of the skull he named Australopithecus africanus, (South African ape). He had chanced on the skull of a 5-year-old child with baby teeth intact and adult molars just breaking through. Dart had found the skull a year earlier in bones embedded in limestone at South Africa’s Cape Province near the village of Taungs. In fact, the creature came to be known commonly as the Taungs child.

For decades, his theory was viewed skeptically, if not discounted completely, by many of his peers who believed that the origins of man were in Asia, not Africa. Some even said the skull was that of a chimpanzee. Further, Dart also was denounced by religious groups who objected to his linking mankind to animals.

But later work by Dart and discoveries by other paleoanthropologists in Africa eventually confirmed his beliefs that although the brain cavity was not human sized, its shape was such that not only was Taungs a forebear of mankind but that Australopithecus africanus had walked erect, on two legs.

Dart established that the Taungs child differed from apes of similar age by having a vertical forehead instead of eyebrow ridges, a recessed face instead of a projecting muzzle and small incisors and canines instead of fangs. The creatures lived from 3 million to 2 million years ago.

Native of Australia

Dart was born in Toowang, Australia, near Brisbane, and graduated from the Sydney University Medical School in 1917. In 1923, he was hired as professor of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he taught until 1958.

He chanced on the Taungs child after sending his students into the field to gather bones for a museum for the university’s fledgling medical school. He had asked for baboon bones, so “the students would be able to differentiate between human bones and those that were not human,” he told the Associated Press in 1983.

A piece of a skull that had been used as a paperweight by a mining official that had come from a cave on the fringes of the Kalahari Desert caught his eye and led him to ask for more fossils. A subsequent shipment produced the block of stone from which--after months of slow and delicate work--he extracted the face of a human-like child.

At the time Dart’s specialty was neuroanatomy, although after 1924 his name was indelibly linked with anthropology.

Prepared for Skepticism

Dart, himself a link to such modern distinguished scientists as Tobias and the Leakey family in Africa, said the early condemnation of his discovery never embittered him.

“I knew people wouldn’t believe me,” he said on the 60th anniversary of the Taungs discovery. “(But) I wasn’t in a hurry.”

Tobias, Dart’s successor at Witwatersrand, wrote in 1983: “Dart’s appreciation and interpretation of the hominid-like traits of Australopithecus represent the single most important breakthrough in paleoanthropology of the 20th Century, next to which all the other African discoveries represented a mere filling-in.”

In a card sent to him on his 90th birthday, friends and colleagues attempted to sum up his vast contribution.

The card showed a dog looking at a bone and saying: “It’s no longer considered for any practical purposes to be anyone’s bone of contention.”