Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

The popular press, initially favorable, also began to adopt a different attitude toward Australopithecus, making Dart’s baby, as it came to be called, a subject of jokes and ridicule. A popular journal, The Spectator, asked readers to submit epitaphs for Australopithecus. One entry selected for publication read (Dart 1959, p. 38):

Here lies a man, who was an ape.

Nature, grown weary of his shape,

Conceived and carried out the plan

By which the ape is now the man.

Dart also received trouble from another quarter—Biblical creationists angry with him for proposing the forbidden missing link between ape and man. Dart (1959, p. 40) wrote: “Letters from religious people all over the world poured into my office, warning me that I was ‘sitting on the brink of the eternal abyss of flame’ and would later ‘roast in the general fires of Hell.’”

In 1931, Dart was invited to London to give a report about his Australopithecus find before the Zoological Society of London. At the same meeting, Davidson Black gave his report introducing Beijing man. Black’s presentation was consummately professional, delivered confidently with well-prepared visual aids. Dart, Taung fossil in hand, apparently stumbled through a weak presentation, simply restating his old case, first made in 1924. He failed to change any minds (Dart 1959, pp. 57–58). Dart later submitted a lengthy monograph on Australopithecus to the Royal Society, which refused to publish the work in full. Dart therefore withdrew it.

11.3.2 Dart Retreats

Dart was dismayed by the cool reception he received from the British scientific establishment. “Perhaps like Davidson Black,” he said, “I should have traveled overseas with my specimens to evoke support for my beliefs” (Dart 1959, p. 51). Instead, Dart remained quietly in South Africa, teaching comparative anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. For many years, he stopped hunting for fossils.

British scientists, led by Sir Arthur Keith, maintained their opposition to Dart’s Australopithecus throughout the 1930s. Keith (1931, p. 82) said that he found the brain markings on the endocranial cast of the Taung specimen to be like those of the gorilla or chimpanzee, and not at all human. He recognized some differences between the brain of the Taung specimen and apes but concluded that “the difference is not such as to lead us to separate Australopithecus from the category of anthropoid apes and place it in a separate group—one intermediate to the highest ape and lowest form of humanity” (Keith 1931, p. 86).

The facial skeleton also appeared quite apelike to Keith. He wrote: “Our comparison of the profile and full-face of the Taung specimen with corresponding views of human and anthropoid skulls leaves no doubt as to the true status of Australopithecus, viz. that in all its essential characters it is a true anthropoid ape” (Keith 1931, p. 103).

Here Piltdown man, believed to be similar in geological age to the Taung specimen, entered Keith’s calculations. The skull of Piltdown man, as we saw in Chapter 10, was like that of Homo sapiens. This fact argued against Australopithecus, with its apelike skull, being in the line of human ancestry.

Keith (1931, p. 109) also held that the Taung specimen’s teeth, relatively bigger than those of a human child, were apelike.

What about the position of the foramen magnum, the opening through which the spinal cord enters the bottom of the skull? Keith pointed out that Dart had wrongly compared the position of the foramen magnum in the juvenile Taung skull with that of adult human beings and adult chimpanzees.

In adult humans, the foramen magnum is located toward the center of the bottom of the skull. This indicates erect posture. In adult chimpanzees, the foramen magnum is located toward the back of the skull, indicating a quadrupedal posture. The Taung skull’s foramen magnum was located in the adult human position, so Dart thought this was good evidence for erect posture in Australopithecus.

Keith, however, pointed out that Dart should have compared the position of the foramen magnum in the infant Taung specimen with that of an infant chimpanzee instead of that of an adult. The foramen magnum of a baby chimp lies in around the same position as that of either the Taung specimen (Keith 1931, p. 110).

Also, the foramen magnum of a human child is situated more forward than the foramen magnum of the Taung baby or a baby chimp.