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invented). The goal of paleoneurology, therefore, is to try to interpret
something about mental functions from whatever information can be
gleaned from them. A tall order, that.
Paleoneurologists are sometimes unkindly accused of practicing the
pseudoscience of phrenology, which was popular in Europe and the
United States in the nineteenth century but has now been thoroughly
debunked. Phrenologists carried the concept of localized brain func-
tions to an extreme, believing that the size and shape of different parts
of a person's cerebral cortex were proportionate to specific skills and
personality traits. They thought, rather whimsically, that an individ-
ual's tendencies for mirthfulness, benevolence, spirituality, secretive-
ness, and combativeness, to name just a few of many examples, could
be assessed by feeling the size and shape of the parts of the skull that
overlaid the so-called organs in the brain for each of these proclivi-
ties. Admittedly, today's paleoneurologists share, to some degree, the
phrenologists' goal of assessing mental functions from skulls, albeit
from casts of their interiors rather than from bumps on their exteriors.
Paleoneurologists, however, ground their observations and analyses in
scientific findings from evolutionary biology, paleontology, and neurol-
ogy. Caution is called for, of course, but the above discussion shows that
endocasts have potential for contributing to our understanding of brain
evolution.
dart's uncovery
Phillip Tobias, one of the world's leading paleoanthropologists and
Dart's eventual successor as chair of anatomy at the University of Wit-
watersrand, points out that there was no single discoverer of the Taung
fossil; instead, a chain of discovery connected de Bruyn, Izod, Salmons,
Campbell, Spiers, Robert Young, and, of course, Dart. 21 But what was
at least as important as the discovery was the painstaking extraction
of the fossil's face and lower jaw from the rocky matrix that entombed
them. That was Dart's doing alone, as were the description, interpreta-
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