Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
intelligence and mastery over “a vast open country with occasional
wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water, together with a fierce and
bitter mammalian competition . . . a laboratory such as was essential to
from Java, many scientists had long held that the human line originated
in Asia, while the Piltdown committee was currently hedging its bets
in favor of a British cradle for humanity. In his report, Dart noted that
none other than Charles Darwin had theorized that our earliest precur-
skull differed so much from those of previous discoveries and because it
had come from the Southern Hemisphere rather than the tropics, Dart
placed it in a new genus and species,
Australopithecus africanus
(
australis,
“south”;
pithecus,
“ape”), which means “southern ape from Africa.” He was
being very cautious about this and, remarkably, would make a case that
Taung's skull appeared intermediary between those of apes and humans,
although he would later maintain that he “did not, when naming it, claim
it was an ape-man, missing link, or anything other than an ape.”
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Dart's conservatism in his report stemmed in part from his “half-
his situation! There he was in South Africa, thinking he had been ban-
ished from London two years earlier by Britain's eminencies of anatomy,
and into his hands falls a fossil bound to challenge his former colleagues'
pet theories. Taung turned up in the wrong place—Africa instead of
Asia, mainland Europe, or Great Britain. Unlike Piltdown Man's, which
was then thought to be the oldest and most important early fossil on
the line leading to humans, Taung's jaws were humanlike rather than
apelike. And unlike Piltdown's, Taung's brain was ape-sized rather than
ary: “I worked away happily,” he wrote, “and, I am not ashamed to say,
proudly. I was aware of a sense of history for, by the sheerest good luck,
I had been given the opportunity to provide what would probably be
the ultimate answer in the comparatively modern study of the evolution
