Raymond Dart

Raymond Dart's great discovery: the Taung Child, Australopithecus africanus

Raymond Arthur Dart (4 February 1893 – 22 November 1988) was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist, who worked for much of his life in South Africa.

In 1924 he discovered the first fossil of an Australopithecine, at Taung in Northwestern South Africa (now Botswana). It was Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominid closely related to humans. This was a great event in the study of human evolution.

Early life

Dart was born in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the son of a farmer and tradesman. He studied at the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney and University College London, before taking a position as head of the newly established department of anatomy at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1922.

Career

Because he was an Australian, and not a part of the scientific establishment, and because he found the fossil in Africa, and not Europe or Asia, where the establishment looked to for man's origins, his findings were initially dismissed.

Dart's closest ally was Robert Broom whose discoveries of further Australopithecines (and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark's support) eventually vindicated Dart. So much so that in 1947, Sir Arthur Keith said "...Dart was right, and I was wrong."

Other websires

• Brain C.K. Raymond Dart and our African origins, in A century of Nature: twenty-one discoveries that changed science and the world, Laura Garwin and Tim Lincoln, eds.