by Lydia Pyne
It’s easy to see how Piltdown’s discoverer, Charles Dawson, and its champion at the British Museum (Natural History), Arthur Smith Woodward, were invested in the fossil, but the social and scientific investment in Piltdown extended far beyond the narrow confines of scientific literature. Piltdown made its way into museum exhibits, education materials, postcards, satirical cartoons, and letters to the editors of various newspapers. People—culture writ large, really—were and still are invested in the fossil in a way that extended its influence far beyond its discovery site or home in the British Museum. “Our fascination with where we came from is boundless,” Karolyn Schindler argues. “That was why Piltdown was so clever and successful as a hoax: it was what everyone wanted to find—or at least, it appeared to be.”28 In addition to these concerns raised at the fossil’s initial presentation in 1912, the scientific establishment did not accept the fossil or its interpretation completely at face value. Others, though, like Gerrit Smith Miller, Jr., at the Smithsonian, questioned the geological antiquity of the specimen as well as the integrity of the fossil’s provenience.
Twenty-first-century Piltdowners—scientists, historians, enthusiasts, and amateurs alike—continue to grapple with Piltdown, working out finer and finer details of how the hoax was committed and searching for the conspiratorial holy grail that would point unequivocally to the perpetrator. “Eoanthropus is a name with no one to possess it,” Miller noted after the fossil was debunked. While Eoanthropus might be a species empty of fossils, Piltdown is a specimen full of intrigue and possibility.
Piltdown’s open-ended story is intriguing from a historical or even literary perspective—like a fade-out, it allows readers to embrace the implicit ambiguity and to puzzle out a solution for themselves. With so many loose ends, unresolved bits, and unsubstantiated rumors of its life—from its convoluted beginnings where Dawson’s workers described finding a “cocoa-nut” to its modern CSI-like life as a museum curiosity—the story of this fossil is far from over.
Raymond Dart holding the skull and mandible of the Taung Child. (Raymond Dart Collection. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand Archive)
CHAPTER THREE
THE TAUNG CHILD: THE RISE OF A FOLK HERO
A thrill of excitement shot through me. On the very top of the rock heap was what was undoubtedly an endocranial cast or mold of the interior of the skull. Had it been only the fossilised brain cast of any species of ape it would have ranked as a great discovery, for such a thing had never before been reported,” Raymond Dart wrote in his memoir Adventures with the Missing Link in 1959, a little more than twenty-five years after discovering this remarkable fossil skull, the Taung Child, in 1924. “But I knew at a glance that what lay in my hands was no ordinary anthropoidal brain. Here I was certain was one of the most significant finds ever made in the history of anthropology. Darwin’s largely discredited theory that man’s early progenitors probably lived in Africa came back to me. Was I to be the instrument by which his ‘missing link’ was found?”1
At the beginning of the twentieth century, paleoanthropology’s intellectual interests were firmly ensconced in Southeast Asia and Europe, thanks to the discovery of Java Man in 1891, several Neanderthals, like the Old Man of La Chapelle, and Piltdown Man in England—in other words, just about anywhere but Africa. Dr. Raymond Dart, however, was in Johannesburg, South Africa, thousands of miles away from either hot spot in paleoanthropology. But Dart was right: the fossil he found was “one of the most significant finds ever made in the history of anthropology.”
Today, the Taung Child is famous for its scientific significance as the first Australopithecus africanus, of course, but it is just as renowned for the ways it came to exemplify the intertwining of science, history, and the making of a paleocelebrity.
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In January 1924, Dart was a young Australian anatomist beginning his career at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, charged by the university to create a medical and anatomy department. Dart had spent two years prior studying neuroanatomy in London, under the mentorship of British neuroanatomist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith. At the end of his studies in London, made possible by a scholarship, the prominent anatomist Sir Arthur Keith persuaded Dart to apply for the newly vacant position in Johannesburg. Although Dart was rather horrified at the prospect of heading to South Africa, away from the scientific community in London, he successfully applied for the position with every intention of returning to London at some point in the future. (Keith would later write of Dart: “I was the one who recommended him for the post, but I did so, I am now free to confess, with a certain degree of trepidation. Of his knowledge, his power of intellect, and of imagination there could be no question; what rather frightened me was his flightiness, his scorn for accepted opinion, the unorthodoxy of his outlook.”)2
When Dart arrived at the University of the Witwatersrand, he began to establish academic curricula as well as the school’s medical program. One of his more popular classes had students out collecting fossils and comparing the specimens they found with the bones of other, extant species as a means of identifying their discoveries. Dart encouraged his students to collect fossil curiosities for the class, and soon fossil animals trickled into the classroom’s laboratory. In early 1924, Dart’s only female student, Josephine Salmons, saw a particularly curious fossil being used as a paperweight on the director’s desk at the Buxton Limeworks quarry, where a friend of hers worked. (A slightly differing account places the fossil on display on the mantel of the family fireplace, where it piqued Salmons’s interest.) She could tell that the fossil was some sort of primate and guessed that there was some deeper evolutionary significance to the fossil than that of a mere curio, so she asked the quarry director whether her mentor, Professor Raymond Dart, could take a look at it. Dart’s assessment of the fossil was that it was a very old cercopithecoid, or an extinct species of baboon.
Finding the fossil primate was tremendously exciting for Dart and his students because it meant that other primates could be part of the South African fossil record. As an anatomist interested in the structure and evolution of the human brain, Dart was keen to collect more specimens that could shed light on the early evolution of primate brains. Dart asked Salmons to convey his very active interest in any fossils discovered in the Limeworks mine and even proposed offering a small financial reward to any worker there who procured interesting specimens. The director of the Northern Lime Company—Mr. A. E. Spiers, himself an amateur enthusiast and collector of fossil curios—readily agreed to stockpile fossils, although he declined Dart’s offer for monetary compensation. Thus, the director of Buxton Limeworks, Mr. E. G. Izod, set about collecting the more interesting fossils found by the mine’s workmen, which, thanks to the region’s rich limestone geology, were plentiful.
Fossils from the Limeworks quarry were collected and shipped to Dart back in Johannesburg that fall. In October 1924, Dart received a crate of fossils from the mine the day he and his wife were to host a wedding, with Dart as the best man. Upon the arrival of the crate, Dart’s wife, Dora, was less than impressed. In his autobiography, he—rather paternalistically—described Dora’s reaction: “I suppose those are the fossils you’ve been expecting. Why on earth did they have to arrive today of all days? Now, Raymond, the guests will start arriving shortly and you can’t go delving in all that rubble until the wedding’s over and everybody has left. I know how important the fossils are to you, but please leave them until tomorrow.”3 Concerns about guests aside, Dart immediately started rummaging through the crated fossils, in full formal Edwardian attire. He came across a small, fossilized primate brain that stopped him cold. He was so enthralled with the discovery—“a thrill of excitement shot through me … I stood in the shade holding the [fossil] brain as greedily as any miser hugs his gold, my mind racing ahead”—that the wedding party had to more or less drag him down to the ceremony, where a rather put-out groom expectantly waited for Dart to perform his duties as best man. Dar
t recalled, “These pleasant daydreams were interrupted by the bridegroom himself tugging at my sleeve. ‘My God, Ray,’ he said, striving to keep the nervous urgency out of his voice. ‘You’ve got to finish dressing immediately—or I’ll have to find another best man. The bridal car should be here any moment.’ Reluctantly, I replaced the rocks in the boxes, but I carried the endocranial cast and the stone from which it had come along with me and locked them away in my wardrobe.”4
A slightly alternate version of the fossil’s discovery was offered by one Dr. Young, a colleague of Dart’s. In an interview with the Johannesburg Star in 1925, Young described how he’d arrived at the Taung quarry after a set of blastings and found the face of the “missing link” fossil exposed from the rock with the brain portion nearby—a perfect fit of the two fossils. Young claims he carefully packed up the find and, upon returning to Johannesburg, handed the fossil over to Dart. Dr. Young’s claims never met with much traction outside of his interview, although Dart, in his 1925 Nature publication of the fossil, does credit Professor Young and Miss Salmons for their assistance in recovering the fossil.5
In order to remove the fossils—the cranium and mandible—from the tough brecciated limestone, Dart pilfered several pairs of his wife’s knitting needles and sharpened them to form tools to pick precisely at the rock around the fossil. For the next three months, Dart used every spare moment to patiently chip the matrix from the skull. Then, two days before Christmas, the face of a child emerged from the rock. Dart wrote: “I doubt if there was any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my Taungs [sic] baby on that Christmas of 1924.”6 It was immediately christened the Taung Child—Raymond and Dora Dart’s fossil scion.
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Forty days after freeing the fossil from its limestone chrysalis, mid-January 1925, Dart sent an anatomical description, a series of photographs, and a manuscript about the fossil to the journal Nature, which was quick to publish his report. Dart described the fossil as “exhibit[ing] an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.”7 Based on its anatomy, Dart described the fossil as the child of an “apelike” ancestor to man, a small-brained hominin that could already walk bipedally, or on two legs. Dart named the species Australopithecus africanus—the southern ape of Africa. In his description, Dart pointed out the stark anatomical contrasts of the fossil to other apes, like gorillas and chimpanzees. Dart saw these differences—such as where the spinal column was positioned—as clear evidence to strengthen his interpretation of the fossil as a small-brained biped. In addition to the anatomical details of the teeth, the mandible, and the position of the vertebral column, Dart took his interpretations one step further and claimed that the fossil species was clear evidence that Africa was the “cradle of mankind” (Darwin’s own terminology) and that this fossil, this Taung Child, was excellent evidence of a “missing link” that neatly secured fossils within an explanatory schema—Dart saw no reason to aim low in his expectations of the fossil’s import.
Upon its publication, the British scientific establishment back in London—Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, and Dr. W. L. H. Duckworth—published a review of the fossil, also in Nature, and expressed a cautious, almost taciturn, interest in the fossil, but voiced no support of Dart’s interpretation of the fossil as a human ancestor. They were convinced that the fossil was some sort of baboon, similar to the earlier fossil finds from the area. The only visual frame of reference they had for evaluating the fossil was the small photographs Dart included in his Nature article. What they wanted were measurements, casts, and detailed quantitative comparisons. What they got was Dart’s florid prose. “We must therefore conclude that it was only the enhanced cerebral powers possessed by this group which made their existence possible in this untoward environment [South African paleoenvironment]… . For the production of man, a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect.”8 Even Professor Elliot Grafton Smith, Dart’s mentor and champion, expressed cautious curiosity about the Taung fossil at best. Sir Arthur Keith, on the other hand, was quite vocal in his dismissal of the Taung Child as an evolutionary ancestor. In short, the fossil simply didn’t fit.
Dart’s rather fantastical description of the fossil in Nature left little room for the rigors of methodology demanded within the scientific community. Moreover, the community’s reticence to accept the fossil was due, in part, to the dominant evolutionary theory of the early twentieth century. According to theory then accepted and in vogue, fossil ancestry ought to be apelike, big-brained ancestors from Southeast Asia or Europe. (The establishment scientists were all firm proponents of Piltdown Man as an ancestor; Piltdown’s anatomy supported the current trends in evolutionary thinking, and it would be more than two decades before the fossil was debunked as a hoax.) Dart’s Taung Child was “wrong”—it was geographically unexpected and none of the fossil’s characteristics were in favor. But another part of the fossil’s nonacceptance was due to the way that Dart “did” science. The way that the fossil was described, the nonconventional taxonomy (mixing Greek and Latin in the name), to say nothing of his rather rococo narrative—Dart was flying by the seat of his pants in how he communicated his findings to the scientific community, and his style put the establishment’s collective knickers in a twist.
Raymond Dart posing for portrait with pipe, white lab coat, microscope, skull, and Taung Child fossil—all the trappings of science. (Raymond Dart Collection. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand Archive)
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Shortly after publishing the description of the Taung Child in Nature, Dart commissioned a cast of the fossil, which included its three components: the endocast of the brain, the mandible, and the craniofacial part of the skull. (Dart described the fossilized brain as “startling” with “its convolutions and furrows of the brain and the blood vessels of the skull … plainly visible.”)9 To create the fossil’s casts, Dart contacted the London-based R. F. Damon & Co., a company well established within anthropological and paleontological circles. Prior to the Taung Child, R. F. Damon & Co. had created casts and busts of Piltdown as well as Eugène Dubois’s 1891 Java Man discovery and countless fossil casts of all sorts of animals. (And a decade after the discovery of Taung, it would create the casts of the Peking Man fossils from Zhoukoudian.) The casts were created and slowly began to circulate through museums, scientific labs, and other spaces.
Casts of the fossil meant that, regardless of the interpretations surrounding its evolutionary status, the fossil was being seen by many audiences. (Dart held the copyright to the Taung Child and earned royalties on every cast made of it.) When Dart worked with R. F. Damon & Co. to set the prices for the Taung Child, the director, Mr. Barlow, begged Dart to reconsider his position about the exorbitant cost of the cast, arguing, “The prices you suggested would result in killing the demand and would create in my customers a feeling of resentment which I am not willing to incur.”10 Dart conceded to Barlow’s suggestions of a lower price.
At the cost of £15, cast replicas of the Taung Child were commissioned from R. F. Damon and sent to other museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in the 1930s. (Fifteen pounds in 1925 equates to roughly £800, or $1,250, today—a significant chunk of change, but feasible within many museum budgets.) With a great deal of diplomatic tap dancing on the part of R. F. Damon, a set of Taung Child casts were even sent to the Moscow Museum in 1933. Dart kept up a correspondence with other paleoanthropologists (like the eminent Franz Weidenreich, then working at the Zhoukoudian site in China), offering to trade a copy of the Taung Child’s cast for a copy of whatever work that was currently relevant, in the process building the comparative collection at the University of the Witwatersrand. Dart was inundated with numerous requests, from Australia to Botswana, for copies of the Taung fossil as museums sought to display the famous fossil to visitors and to keep it as a scientific resource for their scientists. Royalties from the casts continued t
o trickle back to Dart over the ensuing decades.
Dart was quick to propose that one of the casts be submitted to the British Empire Exhibition in late 1925, writing to the Exhibition Committee’s chairman Captain Lane with an extensive proposal. The Exhibition showcased goods produced and manufactured in the colonies, and the connections between colonial raw materials and technology, such as the expansion of railroads across India. Over 1924 and 1925, the Exhibition attracted twenty-five million visitors.11 It was a way for the British Empire to highlight, promote, and show off industry, technology, and science, and to establish commercial and industrial ties across the empire. It was certainly a timely opportunity to promote the fossil.
Because Dart’s original publication of the Taung fossil in Nature was met with so much skepticism, Captain Lane was hesitant to accept the loan cast for the Exhibition. He worried he’d look particularly foolish if the Committee decided to display a fossil cast that the scientific community thought to be insignificant. Prominent anthropologist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, however, championed the display of the fossil: “It is unusual for an investigator to issue casts of his material before his full report has been published. The South African authorities therefore have done a real service to science by exhibiting the casts at Wembley now.”12 Although Smith was cautious about interpreting the Taung Child as a human ancestor, he called Keith’s rhetoric in Nature an “outburst” and argued that the Exhibition was fortunate to have the opportunity to display the cast.13
