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exhibit was tantamount to claiming Taung was a “missing link,” Keith
railed, “An examination of the casts exhibited at Wembley will sat-
isfy zoologists that this claim is preposterous—the skull is that of a
young anthropoid ape.” Keith also asserted that Taung was too recent
to “have any place in man's ancestry.” What really got to him, I sus-
pect, was Dart's dethronement of Piltdown Man in his chart. Keith
observed,
In a large diagram . . . Prof. Dart gives his final conception of the place occu-
pied by the Taungs ape in the scale of man's evolution. He makes it the foun-
dation stone of the human family tree. From the “African Ape Ancestors,
typified by the Taungs Infant,”
Pithecanthropus,
Piltdown man, Rhodesian
man, and African races radiate off. A genealogist would make an identical
mistake were he to claim a modern Sussex peasant as the ancestor of Wil-
By then, Dart's mood had changed from one of exultation to depres-
sion, because he felt that the leading anthropologists were “ganging
Smith continued to be supportive. Within three days of Keith's unpleas-
ant communication in
Nature,
Elliot Smith wrote to Captain Lane that
he need not be disturbed by it, because Dart had always claimed that
Taung was an ape, but one that also had manlike traits, and that there
was no question about this. He noted, too, that Professor William Sollas
of Oxford had recently corroborated Dart's conclusions, and he added
a comment that would ring as true today as it did then: “It is unusual
for an investigator to issue casts of his material before his full report has
been published. The South African authorities therefore have done a
real service to science by exhibiting the casts at Wembley now.”
23
Although Dart had become depressed by the controversy surround-
ing Taung, he managed to publish a reply to Keith in
Nature
that was
both accurate and masterfully ironic, and perhaps deserved in light of
Keith's sarcastic remark about the genealogy of William the Conqueror:
