Taung’s Checkered Past - The Fossil Chronicles - page 52

Despite his recovery, Dart remained aloof from anthropological re-
search until 1945, when his student Phillip Tobias pulled him back into
the fold. After Tobias returned from leading a group of medical and
science students on an exploration of the Makapansgat Valley, in the
northern Transvaal, he told Dart that they had found stone tools and
a skull of a fossil baboon at a limeworks site. The skull, which Tobias
gave to Dart, resembled the fossil that Josephine Salmons had brought
to Dart in 1924, which sparked the search for fossils that led to Taung.
Tobias suggested the skull indicated that Makapansgat was older than
previously believed, perhaps even as old as the Sterkfontein site that
was yielding australopithecines. When Dart agreed, Tobias asked him,
“Then doesn't this tempt you back into the field of anthropological
research?” 63 Dart later recalled, “It was almost as if he had read my
thoughts. It might not only prove to be as old as anything yet discovered
but might also yield a more complete man-ape than those found by
Broom. Summoning Tobias to follow, I went to my workshop and took
down my hammers, chisels and other anthropological tools which had
lain neglected for so many years. 'You have my answer,' I told him.” 64
Broom's accumulating fossils proved that Dart had been right—aus-
tralopithecines had walked upright, their canines were smaller than
those of apes, and their teeth looked more humanlike than apelike.
Broom and his colleague Gerrit Schepers prepared a massive volume
“detailing every scrap of evidence about the man-apes.” 65 Published in
1946, the topic, The South African Fossil Ape-Men: The Australopithecinae,
won a medal for being the most important work in biology from the
National Academy of Sciences in the United States. Thanks to Dart's
renewed interest, Makapansgat yielded the first of many australopith-
ecines in 1947.
That same year, Oxford anatomist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark capitulated
from his earlier views in an extensive analysis of the australopithecine
fossils, which he had since studied firsthand. In Le Gros Clark's opinion,
the fossils were hominids (now called hominins) rather than pongids
(apes). Further, in a sentiment that presaged the fall of Piltdown Man,