Raymond Dart with Taung Child Skull

Raymond Arthur Dart (February 4, 1893 - November 22, 1988) was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist. In 1924, Dart discovered the first Australopithecus africanus fossil, an extinct hominin closely related to humans. His colleague, Professor Robert Young from the Buxton Limeworks, had sent Dart two crates of fossils from the small town of Taung in the North West Province of South Africa. He immediately recognized one as being an early human because its brain dimensions were too large for a baboon or chimpanzee. As Dart was not part of the scientific establishment, and because he found the fossil in Africa, and not Europe or Asia, where the establishment supposed man's origins, his findings were initially dismissed. His closest ally was Robert Broom whose discoveries of further Australopithecines (as well as Wilfrid Le Gros Clark's support) eventually vindicated him. His theories were popularized by Robert Ardrey, first in an article published in The Reporter and reprinted in Science Digest, and later in Ardrey's influential four-book Nature of Man Series

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Africanus Anatomist Ancestor Anthropologist Anthropology Australopithecine Australopithecus Dart Hominid Pliocene Prehistory Taung

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