Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [12]
Outraged by Dart’s conduct, the scientific establishment closed ranks against him. After observing the plaster casts, Keith rejected Dart’s entire case. ‘The famous Taung skull is not that of the missing link between ape and man’, he said in a press statement. In a letter to Nature on 22 June, he reported: ‘An examination of the casts exhibited at Wembley will satisfy zoologists that this claim is preposterous. The skull is that of a young anthropoid ape—one which is in its fourth year of growth, a child—and showing so many points of affinity with the two living African anthropoids, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, that there cannot be a moment’s hesitation in placing the fossil form in this living group’. The Taung ‘ape’, he said, was ‘much too late in the scale of time to have any place in man’s ancestry’.
Elliot Smith followed suit. In a lecture at University College, he remarked: ‘It is unfortunate that Dart had no access to skulls of infant chimpanzees, gorillas or orangs of an age corresponding to that of the Taung skull, for had such material been available he would have realised that the posture and poise of the head, the shape of the jaws, and many details of the nose, face and cranium upon which he relied for proof of his contention that Australopithecus was nearly akin to man, were essentially identical with the conditions in the infant gorilla and chimpanzee’.
Dart never recovered from these attacks. Not only scientific colleagues but popular opinion veered against him. The Taung child became little more than a music-hall joke. Disheartened by this turn of events, Dart buried himself in university work. When the university authorities offered him the opportunity to travel to Europe to show his prize specimen to scientists there and to compare it with other known fossils, he declined to go. Nor did he make any attempt to search for an adult Australopithecus at Taung or at other limestone mines to bolster his case.
Moreover, the flurry of interest in the Taung child was soon overtaken by news of a significant discovery in China. Palaeontologists working in an abandoned lime quarry at Chou K’ou Tien (now Zhoukoudian), a village forty miles from Beijing, uncovered hominid remains that became known as ‘Peking Man’, adding weight to the theory that Asia, not Africa, was the cradle of humankind. A distinguished American scientist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, was convinced of the matter and steered large sums of money towards research in Asia. In a book published in 1927, Man Rises to Parnassus, Osborn made not a single reference to Dart, Taung or Australopithecus africanus. Not only was Dart’s child the wrong creature; it was in the wrong part of the world.
When members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science visited South Africa in 1929, Dart’s hopes that they would take an interest in the Taung child were soon dashed. ‘Although some examined and made non-committal comments’, he recalled, ‘it was obvious that few regarded it as anything of real importance in the evolutionary story’.
Dart made one last attempt to persuade the scientific establishment of the validity of the Taung child. In 1931, six years after he had first set eyes on it, he brought the skull to London, hoping for a more favourable reception. But he found the London experts—Keith, Elliot Smith and Smith Woodward—far more preoccupied with Peking Man than interested in listening to his arguments.