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of Australopithecus africanus have been recognized much sooner, and, if
so, would paleoanthropology now be more advanced, if not less acrimo-
nious? Would Raymond Dart's monograph have been published, after
all? And where would our understanding of hominin brain evolution be
today if it had been? It is encouraging that, despite such chance events
(especially the wild card of the Piltdown fraud), scientific views about
human origins have progressed during the past century and a half and
continue today to be modified in the face of new evidence.
An initial skepticism about new hominin discoveries among some
scientists as well as religious fundamentalists is not the only trend that
is evident when we broaden our historical perspective beyond Taung
and Hobbit. There have also been parallels among the discoverers of
important hominins. Take, for example, Eugène Dubois, who recovered
a tooth, skullcap, and femur on the island of Java in the early 1890s and
identified them as parts of an ape-man called Pithecanthropus erectus. 1 As
Raymond Dart would later do, Dubois had read and embraced Darwin's
On the Origin of Species and had trained in medicine and anatomy. 2 Both
men took jobs in foreign countries, where they became involved with
fossil hunting. In fact, Dubois signed on as a medical officer in the Royal
Dutch East Indies Army for the explicit purpose of finding the missing
link in what is now Indonesia. Dart was also subject to wanderlust, hav-
ing relocated to South Africa from Australia, via England, before mak-
ing the scientific find of a lifetime. 3 So was another Australian, Mike
Morwood, whose archaeological team unearthed Hobbit in 2003 on the
small island of Flores, in Indonesia.
Remarkably, it would only take four years after Dubois arrived in the
Indies before his crew unearthed an ancient tooth and skullcap from a
fossiliferous gravel terrace at Trinil, along the Solo River, in Java, in 1891.
(The following season produced a modern-looking but pathological leg
bone from the same beds.) Dart was even quicker to acquire Taung,
which happened less than two years after he had relocated from London
to Johannesburg. For his part, Morwood's discovery of LB1 occurred
eight years after he conceived of a project to study hominin origins in
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