Raymond Arthur Dart

Raymond Arthur Dart was an Australian-born South African anatomist and anthropologist who made a significant contribution to the study of human evolution. He is best known for his discovery of the first fossil skull of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in South Africa in 1924. This finding challenged the prevailing view that Asia was the cradle of mankind and provided evidence for the origin of humans in Africa. Dart was born in Toowong, a suburb of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, on 4 February 1893. He was the fifth of nine children of Samuel Dart, a storekeeper, and Eliza Ann Brimblecombe, a farmer's daughter. He attended Ipswich Grammar School and the University of Queensland, where he graduated with honours in biology in 1914. He then studied medicine at the University of Sydney, where he obtained his MB and Ch.M. in 1917. He served as a captain and medic in the Australian Army in England and France during the last year of World War I. After the war, Dart moved to London and worked as a senior demonstrator in anatomy at University College under Grafton Elliot Smith, a renowned anatomist and anthropologist. He also spent a year on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in the United States, where he visited various anatomical departments and research institutes. In 1922, he accepted the position of professor of anatomy at the newly established University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he spent most of his career. In 1924, Dart received two crates of fossils from Taung, a limestone quarry near Kimberley, South Africa. Among them was a fossilised skull of a young hominin that had a mixture of ape-like and human-like features. Dart recognised its significance and named it Australopithecus africanus, meaning "southern ape of Africa". He published his description of the fossil, which he called the Taung Child, in the journal Nature in 1925. He argued that it represented an intermediate stage between apes and humans and that it supported Charles Darwin's hypothesis that humans evolved from African ancestors. Dart's discovery was met with scepticism and criticism by many scientists who favoured the idea that humans originated from Asia and that brain size was the primary criterion for human evolution. Dart's fossil had a small brain but a human-like posture and teeth. It took more than two decades for Dart's claim to be accepted by the scientific community, after more fossils of Australopithecus were found by other researchers in South Africa and East Africa. Dart continued to work on fossil hominins and other aspects of anatomy and anthropology until his retirement in 1958. He also founded the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa in 1956 and delivered the first Raymond Dart Memorial Lecture in 1964. He received several awards and honours for his work, including the Viking Fund Medal in 1957 and honorary degrees from various universities. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1955. Dart married twice and had two children. His first wife was Dora Tyree, a medical student from Virginia, whom he married in 1921 and divorced in 1934. His second wife was Marjorie Frew, the head librarian at the University of Witwatersrand, whom he married in 1936. His son Galen suffered from cerebral palsy due to birth complications. Dart died on 22 November 1988 in Johannesburg at the age of 95.