Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [458]
11.3 The Birth of Australopithecus
In 1924, Josephine Salmons noticed a fossil baboon skull sitting above the fireplace in a friend’s home. Salmons, a student of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, took the specimen to her professor, Dr. Raymond A. Dart. She thus set off a train of events that would win Dart worldwide fame.
The baboon skull given to Dart by Salmons was from a limestone quarry at Buxton, near a town called Taung, about 200 miles southwest of Johannesburg. Upon learning this, Dart asked his friend Dr. R. B. Young, a geologist, to visit the quarry and see what else might be found. At the Buxton quarry, Young found a limestone wall, the surface of which showed signs of old caves, filled in with a hard mixture of sand and travertine (a deposit of calcium carbonate). It was this old cave filling that contained the fossils, including many baboon bones. In fact, baboons still inhabited caves on nearby cliffs. When the sections of the wall containing the ancient cave deposits were blasted, Young collected some fossilbearing chunks and sent them to Dart (Keith 1931, pp. 39– 46).
11.3.1 The Taung Child
Two crates of fossils arrived at Dart’s home on the very day a friend’s wedding was to be held there. Dart’s wife pleaded with him to leave the fossils alone until after the wedding, but Dart opened the crates. In the second crate, Dart saw something that astonished him: “I found the virtually complete cast of the interior of a skull among them. This brain cast was as big as that of a large gorilla” (Wendt 1972, p. 208). Dart then found another piece of rock that appeared to contain the facial bones.
After the wedding guests departed, Dart began the arduous task of detaching the bones from their stony matrix. Without proper instruments, he used his wife’s knitting needles to carefully chip away the stone without damaging the fossil remains. Dart wrote: “No diamond cutter ever worked more lovingly or with such care on a priceless jewel—nor, I am sure, with such inadequate tools. But on the seventy-third day, December 23, the rock parted. I could view the face from the front. . . . The creature which had contained this massive brain was no giant anthropoid such as a gorilla. What emerged was a baby’s face, an infant with a full set of milk teeth and its permanent molars just in the process of erupting. I doubt if there was any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my Taung baby on that Christmas” (Fisher 1988, p. 27).
After freeing the bones, Dart reconstructed the skull (Figure 11.5). He characterized the Taung baby’s brain as unexpectedly large, about 500 cubic centimeters. The average brain capacity of a large male adult gorilla is only about 600 cubic centimeters. Dart noted the absence of a brow ridge and suggested that the teeth displayed some humanlike features (Boule and Vallois 1957, pp. 87–88). The front teeth were smaller in relation to the back teeth than in the apes, the canines were not as pointed, and there was no diastema. The diastema is a gap between the teeth of the lower jaw in apes. The gap accommodates the tips of the large canines protruding downward from the upper jaw. The teeth of apes tend to be arranged in a U-shaped fashion, with the rows of back teeth on either side of the jaw running straight and parallel to each other. The teeth of the Taung specimen, like those of human beings, were arranged in a curved, parabolic dental arcade. The youthful age of the creature could be determined from the fact that among the 24 teeth, 20 were milk teeth and 4 were permanent molars (Keith 1931, p. 52).
Figure 11.5. Left: The infant Australopithecus skull from a quarry near Taung, South Africa, after a photograph by A. R.