Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [10]
Even though Dart had not yet completed his work on digging out parts of the skull, he decided to despatch his findings to England. On 6 January 1925—only forty days after first catching sight of the Taung child—Dart posted his article to Nature, together with line drawings and photographs, in time to catch the Cape Town mail boat. He also alerted the local press. He anticipated a degree of scepticism from the British scientific establishment. What he did not expect was outright rejection.
Dart’s manuscript arrived on the desk of the editor of Nature, Richard Gregory, on 30 January. Gregory considered its claims to be ‘so unprecedented’ that he sent proofs of the article to four eminent experts: Sir Arthur Keith, who was the current doyen of British evolutionary studies; Grafton Elliot Smith, the brain specialist at University College, London; Sir Arthur Smith Woodward from the Natural History Museum; and Wynfrid Duckworth, a Cambridge anatomist. But before the four experts had time to give it much consideration, news swept around the world that Dart had discovered ‘the missing link’.
On 3 February, the Johannesburg Star published a scoop about the Taung child, based on Dart’s article and photographs that he had given to its news editor. The Star’s report was carried by other newspapers the following day—Dart’s thirty-second birthday—turning the fossil into a global sensation. Headlines focused upon some of Dart’s more dramatic claims: ‘Ape-Man of Africa had commonsense’; ‘Missing Link that could speak’; ‘Birth of Mankind’. For days, Dart was inundated with cables offering congratulations. Learned journals asked for articles; publishers proposed book contracts.
But the reaction of the scientific establishment was far more cautious. During the three years that Dart had spent in London, working at University College, he had gained a mixed reputation. He was seen as having high potential but also a troublesome streak. A paper he had produced on nerve cells challenging accepted opinion had turned out to be wrong; Dart’s adamant defence of his position had raised concerns among some scientists that he ‘might be inclined too hastily to arrive at conclusions on too little evidence’. Sir Arthur Keith recalled in his autobiography: ‘Of his knowledge, his power of intellect and of imagination there could be no question; what rather frightened me was his flightiness, his scorn for accepted opinion, the unorthodoxy of his outlook’. Keith had been willing to recommend Dart for the Johannesburg post, but he had done so, he said, ‘with a certain degree of trepidation’.
What immediately disturbed the scientific establishment was the speed with which Dart had leaped into print. The protocol they followed required scientists to spend months, even years, studying specimens before proffering their conclusions. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward had kept a skull from Singa in the Sudan for ten years before publishing a short report on it. The British Museum took seven years to publish a full assessment of a skull from Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) found in 1921.
The scientific community also disliked Dart’s use of extravagant speculation and florid prose.
But there were more profound reasons for the hostile reaction that Dart encountered. Prominent scientists such as Keith and Elliot Smith were convinced that the key factor enabling humans to emerge from the ape masses was brain power; a large brain, they insisted, had preceded the development of other faculties, such as upright walking. Keith had worked out a specific threshold needed for a specimen to be included in the genus Homo: a cranial capacity of 800 cubic centimetres or more. This theory about the importance of brain size had led Keith and Elliot Smith to validate the Piltdown skull as authentic. They continued to regard