Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [8]
When Dart first saw the monkey skull, he realised it was a significant find. Within minutes he sped off with the skull in his Model T Ford to consult a colleague, Professor R. B. Young, a veteran Scottish geologist. Young was familiar with the geology of the Taung area. By coincidence, he had been commissioned to investigate lime deposits a few miles south of Buxton, and he promised Dart that on a visit he was due to make to the area in November 1924, he would call at Buxton and look out for further likely specimens.
Shortly before Young arrived at Buxton, an alert quarryman, M. de Bruyn, blasting out a section of rock-face, noticed an unusual shape among the breccia blocks. De Bruyn had previously collected a number of fossilised baboon skulls from the site, but this latest object appeared to be different. He was sufficiently intrigued to take two bone-bearing blocks to the manager’s office. They were still there when Young called. He immediately recognised their importance, carried them back to Johannesburg and, on 28 November, drove over to Dart’s house.
It was an inopportune moment. The Dart household was in the throes of preparing for a marriage ceremony at the house for two friends, at which Dart was to be best man. His wife, Dora, had made elaborate arrangements. But Dart was transfixed by the fossil blocks that Young had brought him. From his knowledge of brain formation, he instantly discerned part of an ape’s skull with distinct hominid features.
I knew at a glance that what lay in my hands was no ordinary anthropoid brain. Here in lime-consolidated sand was the replica of a brain three times as large as that of a baboon and considerably bigger than that of any adult chimpanzee.
The face remained hidden in the rock. But even without it, Dart knew that aspects of the brain-cast meant that he was on the verge of a remarkable discovery.
I stood in the shade holding the brain as greedily as any miser hugs his gold, my mind racing ahead. Here, I was certain, was one of the most significant finds ever made in the history of anthropology.
Darwin’s largely discredited theory that man’s early progenitors probably lived in Africa came back to me. Was I to be the instrument by which his ‘missing link’ was found?
Engrossed by the rock, Dart ignored his wife’s remonstrations to get ready for the marriage ceremony. Only when the bridegroom began tugging on his sleeve did he take notice. ‘My God, Ray,’ said the bridegroom in an agitated tone, ‘You’ve got to finish dressing immediately—or I’ll have to find another best man. The bridal car should be here at any moment’.
For the next three weeks, Dart used every spare moment to patiently chip away the matrix from the skull. He had no previous experience of such a task, nor any colleagues to whom he could turn for advice. Nor could he find any relevant textbooks other than what he had brought from London. Nor did he have any suitable tools. Apart from a hammer and some chisels he purchased from a local hardware store, his most useful implement turned out to be his wife’s knitting needles that he kept sharpened to a fine point. Day after day he worked in constant fear that the slightest slip of a chisel might shatter the fossil within.
Two days before Christmas, the rock parted and the face of a child emerged. The large brain that Dart had detected belonged not to an adult hominid but to an infant.
Nothing like it had been discovered before. Dart’s fossil consisted of an endocranial cast—a natural mould of the inside of the skull—and a well preserved facial structure including both jaws, all twenty of the milk teeth, and the first of the permanent teeth to erupt, the upper and lower first molars.