by Lydia Pyne
Once the Exhibition Committee was reassured by Smith that Dart wasn’t some unhinged crank, the Committee was most excited to show the cast, praising Dart: “We have had a good deal of attention drawn to this exhibit by the newspaper reports and we are indeed grateful to you for having framed such a nice cast.”14 (Dart opted to send a cast of the fossil, rather than the original, to safeguard the Taung Child against the perils of travel.) In the year since the fossil’s discovery and publication, newspapers in England, South Africa, and as far away as Tasmania had played up the scientific rivalries between Dart and London’s scientific establishment and the question of the evolutionary legitimacy of the fossil, creating a huge public interest in actually seeing the Taung Child at the British Empire Exhibition.
Dart had a clear idea about how he thought the Taung Child should be put on display. Prior to sending off the cast and his materials to the Wembley Committee, Dart brainstormed how to organize information relevant to the fossil so that the viewer could easily follow along with the exhibit. On University of the Witwatersrand letterhead, Dart doodled potential options for showcase sizes, highlighting a four-foot table that would extend out toward the audience. He wanted to include various human and ape crania for a quick visual comparison. He also suggested that diagrams of the geographic provenience—the geologic strata—of the Taung region be shown as a backdrop.
In these sketches, Dart penned “Africa: Cradle of Humankind” on the right side of his sketch—an elegant allusion to the historical legitimacy of his interpretation of his fossil. The “Cradle of Humankind”—the area that Dart had referenced in his Nature article—connoted Darwin’s theory of an African origin for humanity, rather than looking to Southeast Asia, the geographic locale very much in vogue within the scientific community thanks to finds like the Java Man. The reference to Africa, through Darwin’s own language, neatly aligned himself and his discovery as Darwin-centric.
The Taung Child was displayed at Wembley as part of the British Empire Exhibition, 1925. These sketches show Dart’s initial ideas about designing the public exhibit of the fossil. (Raymond Dart Collection. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand Archive)
Dart’s drawings included notes about where to hang photographs of the Limeworks cave and the cliff face to best acquaint viewers with an understanding of the geological context of the fossil itself. The collection of comparative crania curled around the left side of the case, and the entirety of the case’s interior was to be draped in black velvet. The fossil cast was also a great equalizing object, as both expert and amateur fossil enthusiasts saw the fossil casts together in a space that did not differentiate the privilege of education and expertise. Sir Arthur Keith, much to his disgust, had to file through the Exhibition with the rather unwashed rank-and-file masses of humanity for a quick glimpse at the fossil cast, and this did little to endear the Taung Child to him. His summary of the exhibit was less than flattering, and he doubled down on his claim that the Taung Child’s species wasn’t ancestral to modern humans: “A genealogist would make the identical mistake were he to claim a modern Sussex peasant as the ancestor of William the Conqueror.”15
Brochure for the Wembley exhibit describing the Taung Child, 1925. (Raymond Dart Collection. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand Archive)
Meanwhile, members of the public—readers of the newspaper and amateur paleo and fossil enthusiasts—were curious about the fossil and queued for the opportunity to see it. Once the fossil and its scathing dismissal as “only” a fossil ape were published in Nature, newspapers from around the world rushed to publish the debate with synopses of the articles and the most current opinions about whether the Taung Child was, indeed, some sort of human ancestor. (One letter to an editor read, “Dear Sir, I wish for you to tell me whether the Taung Child is truly a human ancestor or not.”)16 These letters spoke to the desire of the general public to be able to classify—or at least make sense of—the fossil.
Although Dart received some brilliantly snippy antievolution letters from local South Africans concerned with the state of his immortal soul, overall the public adored the fossil and all it came to represent. Dart recognized how badly people wanted to know “the story” of the fossil they had read so much about in newspapers and seen at the Wembley exhibit. The act of publicly displaying the fossil—even a cast of the bones—folded the public into the fossil’s interpretation. People became invested in the fossil and claimed a sense of agency about it.
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By 1930, Dart accepted that he needed to work through a more conventional scientific process if he wanted the Taung Child to be accepted by the scientific community as a human ancestor. He prepared a lengthy monograph about the Taung Child with detailed anatomical measurements and comparisons. Dart boxed up the fossil to travel to London to meet with Sir Arthur Keith and other prominent anatomists. Dart intended to argue his case that Taung was indeed a human ancestor, and a fossil to be taken seriously.
Because boat travel to England with the real fossil was risky, Dart took out an insurance policy from Joseph Liddle Financial Insurance Agents of Johannesburg to cover the skull while it was in transit in May 1930. (Dart’s fears were not unfounded; in 1919, crates of fossils from the Zhoukoudian site in China had been lost when the cargo ship they were traveling on sank while going around the Cape of Good Hope.) The Joseph Liddle policy, which covered the marine travel of the Taung Child to and from Europe as well as one year of travel within Europe, required Dart to personally accompany the fossil while insured.17
Once in London, the scientific establishment’s reception to the Taung Child was cordial but decidedly cool. No one was overtly rude or plainly dismissive—but nor were they sold on Dart’s insistence that human evolution would show a small-brained, bipedal hominin as an ancestor, even with his careful studies. Dart painted a rather sad picture of his trip: “This was no setting in which to vindicate claims once daring but now trite… . I stood in that austere and chilly room, my heart bounding with the hope that the expressions of polite attention on the four score faces before me might change to vivid interest as I spoke. I realized that my offering was an anti-climax.”18
It was almost as if the moment that the fossil could have caught the scientific community’s imagination had passed, and they were now interested in other specimens. The “next new thing” in the fossil community had been excavated in Zhoukoudian, China, and the British anatomists were interested in the significance of these China fossils from Peking, which were much more clearly humanlike in ancestry than the Taung Child. The Taung Child’s fifteen minutes of fame were up, at least for the moment.
Dart returned to South Africa and more or less left the business of active fossil hunting to others, like Dr. Robert Broom, and devoted his own time to building up the Department of Anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand medical school. He worked with ethnographic projects around South Africa and began to build a skeletal collection that would eventually become one of the most extensive in the world. He also served as a forensic expert in several court cases in Johannesburg. Although Dart did continue to study and write about australopithecine fossils, like the Taung Child—especially pushing his theories about the bloody and violent underpinnings of human evolution in later decades—his motivation and interests overall seemed to shift from fossils to medicine and anatomy.19
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But fossils continued to come out of the fossil-rich limestone quarries in the surrounding Transvaal region of South Africa, and plenty of other fossil enthusiasts (expert and amateur alike) stepped into the picture. Dr. Robert Broom, a Scottish national, was a paleontologist whose life in South Africa consisted of his medical practice and his work cataloging fossil lizards from the South Africa Karoo region. (The biologist J. B. S. Haldane once described Broom as a man of genius, fit to stand beside George Bernard Shaw, Beethoven, and Titian. Broom’s own biographer, George Findlay, suggested that Broom was about as honest as a good poker player.) Dr. Broom’s
involvement with fossil human ancestors, in addition to his research on fossil lizards, began in 1925 with his congratulatory letter to Dart on the magnificent Taung find. Two weeks after Dart received Broom’s letter, Broom himself arrived—unannounced—in Dart’s laboratory. With Hamlet-worthy theatrical flair, Broom dropped to his knees in front of the fossil “in adoration of our ancestor.”20
This hominin phylogeny doodle was sketched during a meeting between Robert Broom and Raymond Dart, 1925. (Raymond Dart Collection. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand Archive)
During that visit to Dart’s lab in 1925, Broom and Dart discussed different evolutionary scenarios for where Taung fit in the great schema of human evolution. Did Taung come before or after Piltdown? Was Dubois’s fossil from Southeast Asia contemporaneous with Taung? No, it had a larger brain, so it had to come later? And what about the Neanderthals? Where would they fall? While both Broom and Dart thought that the Taung Child was ancestral material, it was less clear how exactly it ought to fit in with other fossils. Broom’s visit was more than just a chance to see the fossil; it emphasized the issues that would need to be overcome in order for the fossil to be accepted as a human ancestor.
Raymond Dart’s sketch of the Taung Child during a meeting with Robert Broom, 1925. (Raymond Dart Collection. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand Archive)
One of the very real issues with the Taung Child was just that: it was a juvenile specimen, not fully grown when it died. As such, it was difficult to see how anatomical characteristics would be expressed as the species became an adult. In fact, Dart’s use of the Taung Child as the type specimen of the species Australopithecus africanus provoked deep philosophical reflection on the nature of species and reconstructing species, even into the twenty-first century. (Since the fossil is a juvenile from the species, and not a fully formed adult, predicting how adults of the species would have looked made assigning adult specimens to the species difficult. If the type specimen—platonic ideal—was the Taung Child, then adult Australopithecus africanus individuals would be assigned based on how researchers thought an adult might have looked.) Broom realized this part of the problem: in order to really get at the anatomy and morphology of the fossil, one needed an adult specimen.
So Broom set off to find himself an adult australopithecine, and in 1947—more than twenty years after the original discovery of the Taung Child—he and his colleague John Robinson found one. The adult australopith they discovered in Sterkfontein was given the taxonomic name Plesianthropus transvaalensis (“Near-Man” of the Transvaal, nicknamed Mrs. Ples), and later reassigned to Australopithecus africanus. The change to A. africanus implicitly argued that the skull that Broom and Robinson had recovered belonged to the same species as the Taung Child. The fully grown adult specimen was finally accepted by the scientific establishment as being a valid species, and a species that might even show an ancestral relationship with Homo. Moreover, it answered the lingering questions from the paleo community about the problems of using a juvenile fossil to construct hominin lineages. Even Sir Arthur Keith had to admit, “You have found what I never thought could be found”—that is, a manlike jaw associated with an apelike skull, the exact reversal of Piltdown.21
In the late 1940s, back in Europe—Britain specifically—several major figures in the paleointelligentsia were taking issue with the decades-long interpretation of the Piltdown fossil. By this point, the Taung Child had been well casted, studied, and measured. Evidence that supported the fossil as a human ancestor was slowly mounting, including an incredibly favorable review of the fossil’s anatomy in 1946 by Oxford anatomist Dr. Wilfrid Le Gros Clark. More fossils from a variety of geographic locales were complicating the phylogeny of human ancestry. Once Piltdown was completely debunked in 1953, it opened up intellectual space for Taung to occupy a place as a human ancestor.
With so much support for the Taung Child fossil, it was impossible to dismiss Dart’s original interpretation of the fossil. “Professor Dart was right and I was wrong,” Sir Arthur Keith conceded in the decades after the fossil’s discovery and controversy. By 1985, the Taung Child—and Australopithecus africanus—were well accepted into the paleo pantheon as a legitimate hominin ancestor. Indeed, when the diamond jubilee of the Taung Child’s discovery was held at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1985, Dart’s reaction to all the fuss was a bit understated. The fossil had become folded into the mainstream of paleoanthropological practice. We have a plethora of ways to think about the life and death of an object, and this is no more apt than with the life of a fossil; in fact, there is something fantastically recursive about understanding the new life of something that itself was once alive. “What a wonderful occasion this is, isn’t it? You know, I was never bitter about how I was treated back in 1925. I knew people wouldn’t believe me. I wasn’t in a hurry,” said Dart at the jubilee celebration.22
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The story of the Taung Child is practically apocryphal in paleoanthropology. These stories function as part of the science’s own identity and values (“good science wins out over detractors”), but the stories also serve to create a heroic persona around Raymond Dart and the fossil itself. As the Taung Child moved into wider and wider audience circles from science to the public, it moved from a cast at Wembley into poetry, literature, parody, and just plain fun. Just as sagas and epic journeys are ways for audiences to become invested in the hero’s quest, the journey of the Taung Child was embraced into a cultural narrative.
In the throes of Dart’s arguments with the scientific establishment in the 1930s, one Dr. Walter Rose of Cape Town, a renowned herpetologist, composed a heroic saga of the fossil’s story—entitled simply “Australopithecus.”
In Pliocene’s far distant time,
When good Earth was in her prime,
In Africa’s congenial clime
I flourished.
My Mother searched the earth for roots,
From bushes bit the tender shoots,
And I on these juicy fruits
Was nourished.
…
The dust soon buried me from view,
So I had nothing more to do
But lie a million years or two
Quite patient.
And when for lime the earth was mined,
They found me where I lay enshrined,
And cried with joy, “My, here’s a find
Most ancient.”
Another cried, “’Tis plain to me
This little creature that we see
Is nothing but a chimpanzee,
Believe me.”
“Tut, tut,” retorted Dr. D …
“My worthy colleague, have a heart;
You put the horse behind the cart.
You grieve me.”
…
“I’m positive this little dome,
That in the forests used to roam,
Proves Africa was man’s first home
Quite nicely.
I claim South Africa’s the place
That first produced the human race.
This little skull confirms the case.
Precisely.”
My finders sang triumphant songs
And said, “This cranium from Taungs
To the long-sought missing-link belongs,
We’ve found it
So we will claim the honor for
South Africa, whilst we explore
The neighborhood to find some more
Around it.”23
And this, gentle reader, is a mere three stanzas from Rose’s poetic gem. It touches on the significant elements of how the story of the Taung fossil became imbued into the public’s mind. In Rose’s enthusiastic telling, the fossil moves through the life and death in the flesh, its fantastical discovery, and its heroic battle in the scientific circles; and the significance of the fossil is projected into the future. It gives the fossil a significant frame of its celebrity—the fossil is a folk hero worthy of its own epic saga.<
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Between the lines, however, incredibly powerful elements move the Taung fossil sandwiched between scientific and popular spheres. There is an effort to root the fossil in a correct geologic era—“In Pliocene’s far distant time.” In Dart’s copy of the poem, the word “Pleistocene” is crossed out and replaced with “Pliocene.” In another stanza, Dart himself is given lines through which he articulates his argument about Taung’s place in the ancestral milieu. There is a subtle, almost nationalistic pride that Taung brings to South Africa. And most interestingly, the writing of the poem in the first person ultimately imbues the reader with a sense that the australopithecine possesses a sort of heroic agency. Taung chooses to overcome his environmental trials—he survives the harsh realities of the Pliocene paleoenvironment while his mother is eaten by a crocodile and dear old Dad is constricted by a python—to have his story told.
There is a striking humanistic flair in the setting of the poem. The first two stanzas set an idyllic and perfect Eden-esque backdrop for the australopithecine existence—no talk of segregation, no financial worries, no social ills that would be very much at the forefront of Rose’s South African audience. After the environment stripped Taung and his older brother from their parents, Taung describes his death: “One day, while quarrelling for a bone He [Taung’s older brother] bashed my skull in with a stone And left it in the cave, alone / To weather.” This is an allusion to incredibly powerful literary motifs. One brother killing another—it’s an archetype straight out of Genesis. In the space of one stanza, we see environmental determinism, an allegory of the Fall, the story of Cain and Abel, and the formation of Taung’s lone heroic story—a fossil sage left to tell humanity about who they are and where they came from.
