Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [13]
With Smith Woodward in the chair, Elliot Smith led off with a masterly account of the Peking Man discoveries, enlivened by lantern slides and casts. Dart’s heart sank: he had neither slides nor casts, only the tiny skull of Australopithecus africanus cradled in his hands.
I stood in that austere and chilly room, my heart bounding with the hope that the expressions of polite attention on the four score faces before me might change to vivid interest as I spoke. I realized that my offering was an anti-climax ...
My address became increasingly diffident as I realized the inadequacy of my material and took in the unchanged expressions of my audience.
Further disappointment followed. Dart had arrived in London with high hopes that the Royal Society would publish a 300-page monograph he had written on the Taung child. But Elliot Smith informed him that only a section of it on dentition would be accepted. Rather than agree to such cuts, Dart took the monograph back with him to South Africa, abandoning plans to have it published.
The final blow came later in 1931, when Keith published his book New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man, in which he devoted an entire chapter to demolishing Dart’s claims about the Taung child. In Britain, Keith’s verdict was regarded as being the last word on the matter.
Demoralised and defeated, Dart lost all interest in palaeoanthropology, gave up work on fossils for many years and subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. The Taung child, meanwhile, lay forgotten on the desk of one of his colleagues in the medical school.
There was one man, however, who took up the cause of Dart’s child, with extraordinary results.
CHAPTER 3
BROOM’S TRIUMPH
ROBERT BROOM WAS both a man of genius and a rogue. He regarded himself as the greatest palaeontologist who had ever lived. His output of scientific papers was prolific. He was acknowledged to be a world authority on the mammal-like reptiles of the prehistoric Karoo, a semi-desert region of South Africa where he lived for many years. Yet for much of his career he had been treated as an outcast by scientific colleagues; at one stage he was banned from access to collections of the South African Museum that he himself had helped establish. His reputation for dubious practices frequently overshadowed his work. ‘If one asks people who knew Broom well whether he was honest, the answers are a little confusing’, wrote his biographer, George Findlay. ‘He probably had the honesty of a good poker player’.
Born in Scotland in 1866, Broom trained as a medical doctor, graduating from Glasgow University in 1889, but was soon consumed by an interest in the origin of mammals. In 1892, he travelled to Australia, home of the most primitive of living mammals, working there as a doctor for four years but spending his spare time studying zoology. Papers he produced on the anatomy and embryology of Australian mammals marked him out as a promising young anatomist.
Returning to London in 1896, Broom became intrigued by fossils from the Karoo, held at the Natural History Museum, which appeared to have links with primitive mammals. He travelled to South Africa in 1897, found work as a medical locum in villages in Namaqualand and began collecting a wide variety of specimens, sending many of them to colleagues overseas. Among the specimens he sent to Sir William Turner at Edinburgh University were some human skulls taken from the bodies of Khoikhoi tribesmen who had died in a recent drought. ‘I cut off their heads’, he explained in a letter, ‘and boiled them in paraffin tins on the kitchen stove’.
South Africa henceforth became his main home. In 1900, he set up a medical practice in the Karoo village of Pearston, devoting much of his time to hunting for fossils. In 1903, he was appointed Professor of Geology and Zoology