Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
why the negative reaction?
Meanwhile, one wonders why Dart's meticulous efforts were given such
short shrift by scholars. Two people have provided particularly con-
vincing insights. Robert Broom, later reminiscing about how Dart was
treated, recalled:
It makes one rub one's eyes. Here was a man who had made one of the great-
est discoveries in the world's history—a discovery that may yet rank in
importance with Darwin's
Origin of Species;
and English culture treats him as
if he had been a naughty schoolboy. I was never able to discover what were
Professor Dart's offences. Presumably the most serious was that when he
found a very important skull he did not immediately send it off to the British
Museum, where it would have been examined by an “expert” and probably
described 10 years later, but boldly described it himself, and published an
Phillip Tobias provided a different but equally persuasive analysis
about why a quarter of a century was needed for Dart's recognition of
Taung as a new species “that was knocking on the door of humanity” to
its time, or premature, because its implications could not be connected
in simple logical steps to the generally accepted knowledge of the
day. The delayed acceptance of Taung was not unique, Tobias noted,
because the same thing had happened with respect to a number of other
important “premature” revelations, such as the laws of genetics and the
lution that were accepted in 1925 but that Taung's implications “flew in
that Asia was the cradle of humanity, brain size led the way during
hominin evolution as suggested by Piltdown, most of Taung's features
could be explained by its youth, and Taung's geological date was too
recent for a human ancestor.
Tobias discussed an additional way in which Taung upset prevailing
views, at least among the public: “Another school of thought, that of
creationism, would not accept an evolutionary link between humans
