Raymond A. Dart Biography

A doctor and surgeon by training, Raymond A. Dart discovered the first fossils of Australopithecus africanus, or "southern ape of Africa," forging the modern era of paleoanthropology.

Raymond Arthur Dart was born to Samuel Dart, a general store operator, and the former Eliza Anne Brimblecombe, on February 4, 1893, the fifth of nine children. Devout Baptists and pioneers in the settlement of Queensland, Australia, Dart's parents raised him in the Brisbane suburb of Toowong, later moving the family to a bush farm in Blenheim. In 1911, on a scholarship, Dart attended Brisbane's newly founded University of Queensland, where he earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in biology. Another scholarship sent him in 1914 to St. Andrew's College at the University of Sydney, where, before the completion of his second year of medical studies, he was appointed as a tutor in biology and granted membership on the college staff. That year, Dart attended the British Association's meeting in Sydney, which brought in noted scientists such as Grafton Elliot Smith and W. J. Sollas. At the conference, Dart became intrigued by the announcement of the discovery of Australia's first human fossil find, the Talgai Skull from Queensland, unearthed by Antarctic geologic explorer T. Edgeworth David. The description was presented by James T. Wilson, head of the university's department of anatomy. Soon thereafter Dart became an assistant to Wilson on neurological research and came to regard him as a mentor.

Dart then served as demonstrator in anatomy and acting vice principal of St. Andrew's College. After receiving his bachelor's degree in medicine and a master's degree in surgery in August of 1917, he enlisted in the Australian Army Medical Corps, finishing his service in France as a captain. Upon his release from the military in 1919, he was immediately appointed to the post of senior demonstrator in anatomy at University College, London, by Grafton Elliot Smith. In 1920, at Elliot Smith's recommendation, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded Dart one of its first two foreign fellowships, allowing him the opportunity to teach at Washington University in St. Louis, and study at the Wood's Hole marine research station in Massachusetts.

By 1922, Dart had rejoined the University's faculty as a lecturer in histology and embryology. The following year, at the insistence of Elliot Smith, Dart took over the vacant anatomy chair at the newly established School of Medicine at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Dart found the School of Medicine in dire need of equipment, facilities, and a collection of bones with which to create a proper anatomy museum. To acquire the latter, Dart encouraged his students to search for fossil bones during holidays. In the summer of 1924, a fossilized baboon skull was brought to Dart's attention by Josephine Salmons, one of his student demonstrators, who had secured the skull from E. G. Izod of Rand Mines Limited. The fossil had been detected while mining a sheet of limestone at Taungs in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, where other fossil baboon skulls had been discovered as early as 1920. Dart asked his colleague, geology professor R. B. Young, to look for similar specimens duringYoung's investigation of the lime deposit at Taungs. By November 28, 1924, Dart had in his hands a fossil skull that would change the face of paleoanthropology.

Young sent back two crates full of bones, one of which held a face and skull still embedded in matrix, along with the internal cast of a cranium found by one of the quarry workers. The cast exhibited fissures that were farther apart than those displayed by any primate he had ever seen. Dart had learned from his earlier neurological studies with Elliot Smith that convolutions toward the back of the primate brain cause two fissures which are farther apart in humans than in apes. Elliot Smith attributed this to the evolutionary expansion of the cerebrum.

Dart freed the face and skull from its rock casing shortly before Christmas of 1924. The face was nearly complete, exhibiting cranial and mandibular features of humanoid rather than anthropoid characteristics. The shape of the jaw and alignment of the teeth also resembled those of humans, as did the set of emerging molars which Dart likened to those of a six-year old child or slightly younger ape. Because of the near completeness of the specimen, Dart was able to measure the position of the foramen magnum--the opening at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord enters the cranial cavity. In his preliminary account of the specimen, published in Nature on February 7, 1925, he noted that the foramen magnum's "relatively forward situation" suggested "an attitude appreciably more erect than that of the modern anthropoids.... The specimen is of importance because it exhibits an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man." Dart believed he had found the "missing link," and that his discovery might bare out English naturalist Charles Darwin's earlier revelation that man's origins were linked to Africa. He named the creature Australopithecus africanus, the "southern ape of Africa."

Dart's views were immediately met with derision by the general public and adamant disagreement by many of his own colleagues, including Elliot Smith and Arthur Keith, who immediately categorized the find within the fossil family of modern gorillas and chimps. His opponents proposed a lack of evidence in morphology and geologic age, and were appalled that the discovery was made in Africa, as during that era, Asia was seen as the cradle of humankind. Yet, Dart did have his defenders, including Scottish anthropologist Robert Broom, whose defense of Dart has been compared to English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley's staunch support of Darwin. Broom's successive series of Taung-like fossil discoveries in Sterkfontein in 1936, and Kromdraii in 1938, would turn the tide of evidence in favor of Dart's South African ape-man.

Dart was elected president of the Anthropological Section of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 1925, became dean of Witwatersand's School of Medicine in 1926, and was appointed vice president of the Anthropology Section of the British Association in 1929. Dart's joint venture with the Italian African Scientific Expedition of 1930 gave him his first glimpse of the gorilla in its natural habitat, precluding his sponsorship of the University of Witwatersrand's Gorilla Research Unit in the late 1950s. Dart's investigation of the Auni-Khomani groups of Southern Bushmen in 1936 was considered the most complete physical study conducted up to that time.

In 1945 baboon fossils had again been found in South Africa, this time at Makapansgat in the northern Transvaal. The subsequent excavation of the site during April of 1947 turned up some three dozen australopithecine fossils, a number of fossilized baboon skulls, and thousands of animal bone fragments. Fractures in many of the baboon skulls found at Makapansgat, Sterkfontein, and Taungs, as well as those found in six australopithecine skulls, led Dart to the conclusion that his ape men had inflicted these mortal blows using bone weapons such as an antelope's upper arm bone, evident in abundance around the Makapansgat site. He further concluded that theirs was a culture adept in the manufacturing of tools and weapons from bones, teeth, and horns, and thus named it the osteodontokeratic culture. While this theory was ultimately rejected by the scientific community, Dart's observations helped create a new field of science called taphonomy, concerning the environmental circumstances that act upon bones after death.

Dart retired from the chair of anatomy in 1958. From 1966 to 1986, he spent half of each year in Johannesburg and the other half in Philadelphia, where he had been appointed United Steelworkers of America Professor of Anthropology in the Avery Postgraduate Institute of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. Dart died on November 22, 1988.

Dart died on June 11, 1978 in Reno, Nevada.