Sulcal Skirmishes - The Fossil Chronicles - page 56

over 30 years ago when my research on the Taung endocast started a
second round in what I think of as the lunate sulcus wars.
When I first visited South Africa as a recently graduated PhD in
1978, I was a newcomer to the field and was fascinated with the subject
of human brain evolution. At the time I knew very little about the his-
tory discussed in the first chapters of this topic, and my sparking of
a prolonged controversy about brain evolution was completely unwit-
ting. I was thrilled that the scientists at the Transvaal Museum and the
University of Witwatersrand allowed me to study the six natural endo-
casts of australopithecines (including Taung's) that had been discovered
by that time and that they also allowed me to describe a fragment of a
seventh natural endocast that had recently been unearthed in a dusty
box in a museum storage room. 2 Equally important, I returned to the
United States with copies of all of the endocasts, which to this day are
among my most prized possessions.
Before I went to Africa, my mentor, paleontologist Leonard Radinsky
(1937 - 85), told me to be sure to keep my eyes out, because I would be
shocked by the number of museum specimens whose appearances con-
tradict their published descriptions. (His second piece of advice was
to take lots of photographs of the scientists I would meet.) Professor
Radinsky's advice turned out to be prophetic when it came to the aus-
tralopithecine endocasts. For one thing, after careful study it was clear
to me that Dart had mistakenly identified the lambdoid suture of the
skull that had been imprinted on Taung's endocast as the lunate sul-
cus! (See lb in figure 7, shown below.) This was a shock, because I had
been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that the endocast, though
small, had a back end that appeared humanlike because of a posteriorly
located lunate sulcus. To my surprise, this was not the case for any of
the australopithecine endocasts. Instead, their overall sulcal patterns
appeared (at least to me) to be entirely like those of similarly sized ape
brains.
At the time, I was a bit star-struck by endocast expert Ralph Holloway,
from Columbia University, who had long championed Dart's description