More to Explore 147
brain. It was three times the size of a baboon’s brain and considerably larger than even an
adult chimpanzee’s.
The brain’s shape was also different from that of any ape Dart had studied. The
forebrain had grown large and bulging, completely covering the hindbrain. It was closer to a
human brain and yet, certainly, not fully human. It had to be a link between ape and human.
Dart feverishly searched through the box for a skull to match this brain so that he could
put a face on this creature. Luckily he found a large stone with a depression into which the
brain cast fit perfectly. He stood transfixed in the driveway with the brain cast and
skull-containing rock in his hands, so long that he was late for the wedding.
He spent the next three months patiently chipping away the rock matrix that covered
the actual skull, using his wife’s sharpened knitting needles. Two days before Christmas, a
child’s face emerged, complete with a full set of milk teeth and permanent molars still in the
process of erupting. The Taung skull and brain were that of an early humanlike child.
Dart quickly wrote an article for Nature magazine describing his discovery of the early
humanoid and showed how the structure of the skull and spinal cord connection clearly
showed that the child had walked upright. Dart claimed to have discovered the “missing
link” that showed how humans evolved in the African plain from apes.
The scientific community were neither impressed with Dart’s description nor convinced.
All European scientists remained skeptical until well-respected Scotsman Robert Broom discovered a second African skull in 1938 that supported and substantiated Dart’s discovery.
Fun Facts: Darwin believed that humanoids emerged in Africa. No one
believed him for 50 years, until Dart uncovered his famed skull in 1924.
More to Explore
Avi-Yonah, Michael. Dig This! Denver, CO: Runestone Press, 1993.
Gundling, Tom. First in Line: Tracing Our Ape Ancestry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
Leakey, Mary. Disclosing the Past. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre. The Hunters of Prehistory. New York: Atheneum, 2000.
McIntosh, Jane. The Practical Archaeologist. New York: Facts on File, 1999.
Phillipson, David W. African Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
Scheller, William. Amazing Archaeologists and Their Finds. New York: Atheneum,
1994.
Tanner, Nancy Makepeace. On Becoming Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.
Tattersall, I. The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human
Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Trinkaus, E. The Neanderthals: Changing the Image of Mankind. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1992.
Wheelhouse, Frances. Dart: Scientist and Man of Grit. Hornsby, Australia:
Transpareon Press, 2001.