Raymond Arthur Dart, born in 1893 in Queensland, Australia, was a neuroanatomist and a paleoanthropologist. He was most famous for discovering the Taung Child. His discoveries of fossil hominins (members of the human lineage) led to important insights into human evolution. He was raised on a dairy farm near Laidley, attended Toowong and Blenheim state and Ipswich Grammar schools. He graduated from the University of Queensland with first-class honours in biology, and studied medicine at University of Sydney. He acted vice-principal of St. Andrew’s College in 1917. He was a medical officer at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and as a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps, served in England and France. In England, Dart took a post at University College, London, as senior demonstrator in anatomy. Then, he spent a year on Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in USA. He married to Dora Tyree, an instructor in anatomy, in 1921.
In January 1923, he moved to South Africa, as a professor of anatomy at The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. In November 1924 Dart was given a fossil skull that had been found recently at Taungs. He extracted the fossil from the hard matrix and found that the skull was a child’s. It was a mixture of apish and human features. Its teeth were human-like while its brain was the size of an ape’s. Raymond Dart had found the missing link in the man-ape line of evolution. He died on 22nd November 1988 at the age of 95 in Reno, Nevada.
I am interested in Raymond Dart’s work because it is fascinating to see what a unique species we are, and how we have evolved into what we are today. I also think it is important to understand the differences between us humans and animals.
Raymond Dart’s scientific areas of expertise was neuroanatomy (he taught neuroanatomy in university) and palaeoanthropology (since he discovered the ‘Taung Baby’). Neuroanatomy is the study and organisation of the nervous system, while palaeoanthropology is the study of fossils of hominids.
In 1942, he found that a fossil baboon skull had been found at a nearby limestone quarry at Taung, so he asked to be sent any more bones or fossils that were found there. The following November, two crates of bones arrived, and Dart found a fossil cast of the inside of a primate skull. It fitted into another piece of stone which possibly could have contained a face. Dart took a month to remove the enough excess stone to reveal the jaw and face of a young fossil primate. He considered the fossil to be in between ape and man. Then he wrote a paper for Nature that described it, named it Australopithecus africanus (nicknamed The Taung Baby).
The fossil of the Taung Child had given Dart clues on the Taung Child’s appearance and behaviour. The fossil consists of most of the face and mandible with teeth and, a natural endocast of the braincase. It is estimated to be 2.5 million years old. Originally thought to have been a monkey or ape, Dart realized that the skull would have been positioned directly above the spine, indicating an upright posture, which is a trait seen in humans and not any of the other primates. The Taung child as originally thought to be about six years old because of the deciduous teeth, but is now believed to have been three or four years of age, based on studies of enamel disposition rates. It was 105cm in height, and weighed about nine to eleven kilograms. It lived mainly in the savannah habitat. After an initial applause, the scientific establishment in Britain rejected the Taung baby as an ape. At that time, Piltdown Man (now listed as a hoax) was accepted as a human ancestor, and Taung, with its apelike skull and human like teeth, seemed difficult to find any relations to the Piltdown Man’s human skull and apelike jaw. Robert Broom, a Scottish doctor and palaeontologist, was the only supporter of Dart.
Dart and Broom became friends and in 1936, Broom decided that he would search for Australopithecines too. That same year, he unearthed the fragmentary skull of a full grown australopithecine at Sterkfontein cave. In 1938, he described and named a new hominid of his own, Paranthropus robustus.
In 1930, Dart went to London to try to win support for his Taung baby, but his discovery was overshadowed by the recently discovered Peking Man skull. From 1925 to 1943, Dart gave up on fossil hunting for many years, concentrating on his work at the Witwatersrand anatomy department instead. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Broom ¬found many more australopithecine fossils in South Africa, and in the late 1940s, Dart’s position vindicated when many scientists finally accepted that the australopithecines were hominids. In the mid-1940s, Dart tried looking for more fossils at the site of Makapangsgat. He found a number of fossils which he named Australopithecus prometheus, thinking that their blackened state indicated the use of fire, but they are now placed in A. africanus. From his analysis, Dart concluded that these creatures had bone, tooth and horn, called an “oesteodontokeratic” culture, and argued that they were barbaric killers with violent tendencies that left their mark in human behaviour. However, these claims were strongly criticised and were proven wrong through later study.
Broom also made additional finds, but a monograph on australopithecines that he co-authored with a man called Schepers, was perhaps more significant than any of his fossil discoveries. It convinced many palaeontologists of what Dart had been claiming all along - that australopithecines were ancestral to modern humans.
Research on the Taung Child continued after Dart’s death and in 2006 it was announced that the Taung Child was killed by a large predatory bird, most probably an eagle.
Raymond Dart’s discovery of the Taung Baby impacted the society greatly, especially for the religious. The news of Dart’s recent discovery had spread so rapidly that it was being debated about in Tennessee, USA in February 1925. The religious people were being hit with hard facts. This resulted in the ban of the theory of evolution being taught in schools. He was harshly ridiculed by other scientists for twenty five years, but in the end he was proved right. Dart's work provided a part of the whole picture of relationships among the various hominids and our direct ancestors, which involves not only external, physical attributes but also the internal, mental and spiritual, aspects of true human beings. His discovery changed the image of mankind and gave the world a better understanding of human evolution, and more specifically, made enormous contributions globally to the fields of physical anthropology and palaeontology. His discovery put the whole human race one step ahead of learning more about the world. Raymond Dart’s work has had a major impact on society, it has contributed to the accurate description we have today of why the species in existence is the way it is, and lets us predict how they will change in response to defined environmental pressures. His discovery of the Taung Child has added new perspectives to the discussion of scientific methodology, because evolution is one of the fundamental concepts in modern thought and is significant to the use of biology in modern society. Without it, all the aspects of biology would lack coherence.
However, people may misuse Dart’s discovery to justify immoral actions such as eugenics, social Darwinism etc. The proof of the theory of evolution has led to racism. Because “darker” people look closer to apes than “white” people, the “white” people claim they are higher on the line of evolution, thus, superior. It has influenced political ideology, essentialism, relativism, ethics, metaphyisics, supernatural, nations and race and religion and has caused a lot of debate and conflict.
In my opinion, society should support scientific research. Millions of people have been saved due to advanced medical research, and it would allow for more technological development. Scientific research can allow us to answer the fundamental questions that have intrigued humanity for all our history, it would give many opportunities for people to participate in research by being educated and trained to eneter the workforce, and however little the idea at present would be, we have every historical reason to expect benefits for our society will justify our investment greatly. Everyone would benefit from scientific research as it would make the world a better place for us.