Raymond Dart

Australian anatomist

• Born: February 4, 1893; Toowong, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
• Died: November 22, 1988; Johannesburg, South Africa

Twentieth-century Australian anatomist and anthropologist Raymond Dart spent most of his working career in South Africa. He discovered the remains of a hominid, Australopithecus, that provided an important evolutionary link between humans and apes and that contradicted the belief that human evolution began in Asia or Europe.

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Anatomy; paleontology; anthropology

Early Life

Raymond Arthur Dart was the fifth of nine children born just outside Brisbane, Australia, to Samuel Dart and Eliza Anne Brimblecome Dart, both devout Baptists. Raymond grew up on a dairy farm near the pioneering agricultural community of Laidley, west of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland.

A brilliant and eager student who initially intended to become a medical missionary, Dart attended local grammar and high schools, winning a scholarship to the University of Queensland and graduating with top honors and a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1914. He received a master’s degree in 1916 and then attended the University of Sydney, where he received a bachelor’s degree in medicine and a master’s degree in surgery in 1917. Dart continued his studies at the University of Sydney’s St. Andrew’s College, where he also served as a biology tutor, a demonstrator of anatomy at the medical school, and as acting vice principal of the college.

During World War I, Dart enlisted in the Australian Army Medical Corps and served behind the lines in France and England until 1919, when he left the military and was appointed senior demonstrator in the Department of Anatomy at University College London, where he assisted Australian-born anatomist and archaeologist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937). In 1920 and 1921, Dart studied and lectured on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1921, he married American anatomy instructor Dora Tyree and returned to England.

Life’s Work

In 1923, Dart applied for and was accepted as professor of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was also charged with establishing and growing the university’s fledgling medical school. When Dart arrived at the medical school, there was virtually no equipment, no faculty, no library, and no schedule of classes. During his tenure as dean of the Faculty of Medicine (1925–43), however, he helped to build the school into a respectable institution with a world-class anatomy department. Dart expanded the department’s curriculum to include laboratory research and fieldwork that incorporated aspects of paleontology and anthropology.

In the course of creating the anatomy department, Dart asked that students bring in human bones or fossils that could be used to start the university’s collection of specimens for comparative examination. One student, Josephine Salomons, brought him a child-sized fossil skull from a quarry near the town of Taung. Eventually dubbed the “Taung Baby,” the skull was different from any previously found, because it seemed to exhibit both ape and human characteristics. Dart believed the discovery filled an important gap in the fossil record of early human evolution, and in a 1925 article in the British journal Nature, he introduced the find as Australopithecus africanus (“southern ape of Africa”).

The scientific community scoffed at Dart’s theory and dismissed his claims. Based on other fossil finds, including the so-called Piltdown Man (discovered in England and later proven a hoax), Peking Man (discovered in China) and Java Man (found in Indonesia), scientists believed that Europe or Asia were the probable cradles of humanity, and they criticized and ridiculed Dart, who then spent the next two decades focusing instead on developing the anatomy department at Witwatersrand.

Dart divorced his wife in 1934, and in 1936 he married librarian Marjorie Gordon Frew. They had a daughter, Diana Elizabeth Dart Graham, later a pathologist in Florida, and a son, Galen Alexander Dart.

Dart’s theory of Africa as the genesis of humanity—an idea Charles Darwin first proposed in The Decent of Man (1871)—was not widely recognized or accepted until the mid-1950s, when additional and more complete Australopithecus fossils (ultimately dated at two to three million years old) were found in South Africa. Meanwhile, Piltdown Man was proven fraudulent, and Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) and Java Man (originally Pithecanthropus, now called Homo erectus erectus) were found to be more recent than Dart’s Australopithecus specimens. His reputation rehabilitated, Dart reentered the archaeological and anthropological fields, and between 1949 and 1965, he published dozens of papers and a book on new findings of Australopithecus remains, fossilized baboon skulls, and thousands of animal bone fragments from several sites in South Africa. Based on fractures in many of the baboon and Australopithecus skulls, Dart hypothesized a violent streak on the part of protohumans, the “killer ape theory,” and he concluded that Australopithecus africanus used bones as weapons and tools. This theory remained unproven and controversial into the twenty-first century.

Dart retired as professor emeritus at Witwatersrand in 1958. His autobiography, Adventures with the Missing Link, was published the following year. Between 1966 and 1986, Dart conducted research and taught for six months each year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, a nonprofit educational organization that helps parents of both healthy and brain-injured children to increase neurological development through visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation.

In 1988, Dart died at the age of ninety-five in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Impact

Raymond Dart’s Australopithecus discovery and its acceptance decades later paved the way for fieldwork by paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, whose discoveries of fossils in East Africa further confirmed Dart’s hypothesis that Africa was the site of the origin of Homo sapiens. The Leakeys’ discovery of ancient precursor species also filled in evolutionary gaps and served to date humankind’s development several million years earlier than Dart’s Australopithecus.

Raymond Dart’s legacy also continues at the University of the Witwatersrand, now a world-class institution ranked high in research and academic excellence. The School of Anatomical Sciences features the Raymond Dart Collection, which he began upon his arrival, and houses one of the world’s largest assemblages of human skeletons with thousands of documented specimens. The collection has allowed detailed study for multiple fields, including forensic anthropology, population biology, dentistry, clinical medicine, forensic pathology, and paleontology.

Dart also helped shape the university’s medical library resources, growing references during his tenure from 600 to more than 40,000 volumes. Likewise, the university’s Institute for the Study of Man in Africa, founded in 1956 in Dart’s honor, continues to explore factors that affected the evolution and dispersion of humankind. The Raymond Dart Memorial Lectures, given annually since the 1960s, introduce topics germane to the study of human development.

Dart’s 1924 assertion that humankind first evolved on the African continent is now widely accepted as fact. His later theories regarding early hominids’ use of animal bones or horns as weapons, though controversial, helped inspire a new field of study called taphonomy, which focuses on the decomposition of organic material in relation to other aspects of paleontology.

Bibliography

Corbey, Raymond H. A. The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Offers anthropological analysis of the history, philosophy, and archaeology surrounding the descent of humankind from apes.

Falk, Dean. The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. Print. Investigates the impact of Raymond Dart’s 1924 discovery of the Australopithecus skull in Africa and the 2003 discovery of a partial skeleton in Indonesia believed to be a more recently extinct species of human.

Gibbons, Ann. The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. New York: Anchor, 2007. Print. Examines the personalities and competitive atmosphere surrounding modern paleontology in the search for discoveries of human evolution.

Reader, John. Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print. Surveys the history of the quest for humankind’s beginnings, with an emphasis on archaeological discoveries that have shaped and reshaped scientific theory.