Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
humanity, skeptical or believing, is gripped by the Taung infant? It is
because every thinking man and woman has weighed through many
hours the perplexing problems of 'Whence have I come? What am I
doing? Whither am I going?' and it is because, amidst a myriad of philo-
sophical hypotheses, science provides concrete and tangible evidence in
answer to the first of this fundamental trinity of enquiry, that youth and
repeated this sentiment and added his thoughts on religion:
A few thousand years ago when urban civilizations were first established
kings and priests formulated theocratic answers to these questions. The
sacred writings of the world's great religions enshrine various modifications
of these early ponderings and answers. Only during the last century—and
especially since Dubois's explosive discovery of
Pithecanthropus
in 1893 and
the dating of the world's rocks by radioactive clocks—has it been possible
to give scientific facts and so to answer these profound questions with more
precision than our ancestors could.
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public triumph, private person
Although it was slow in coming, the scientific community eventually
accepted Dart's interpretation of Taung, which is now regarded as one of
the most (if not
the
most) important hominin discoveries of the twenti-
First, in the same year that Dart finished his ill-fated monograph (1929),
he was finally able to part Taung's upper and lower jaws, which exposed
the biting surfaces of the teeth. (The reason this took such a long time
was that Dart had to work painstakingly to free the specimen of its
adhering cementlike breccia by using tools such as knitting needles.)
He sent dental casts to experts all over the world, including William
King Gregory at the American Museum of Natural History, in New
confirmed Dart's view that Taung's dentition was “remarkably man-
