In 1919, the Department of Anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand , which marks its centenary this year, had been lucky to stagger to life at all. Yet, it would come to seed a trove of some of the most important insights into the opening chapters of the human story, such as 3.67-million-year-old “Little Foot”, and the Taung child — just three and a half when its ignominious little life expired in an eagle’s lair some 2.8 million years ago.
Palaeo climates may offer the biggest portent of all. Of all human species confronted by catastrophic versions of Earth, we’re the last ones standing.The unassuming shed at Wits was, therefore, no small miracle of scientific fortitude, especially against Cape Town’s Union Government, Tobias writes.
“As soon as I removed the lid a thrill of excitement shot through me. On the very top of the rock heap was what was undoubtedly an endocranial cast or mould of the interior of a skull …, who had a special interest in skull and brain morphology. He was working against the ticking clock. Dressed in “London-cut morning clothes”, Dart recalls in his book,, he was about to host a wedding at his home — and he was best man. He “ransacked feverishly through the boxes”.
For 31-year-old Dart, a revised historical narrative of the human universe glimmered into view. “On the 73rd day, the rock parted,” he writes in. “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.” Here someone had uncovered for the first time a hominin who had, at some point on the path to becoming human, placed a bigger reliance on “feet as organs of progression”, as Dart puts it in his 1925had freed up its hands as “instruments of growing intelligence” and “organs of offence and defence”, Dart suggests in the article, rather than the regrettable alternative of “developing massive canines and hideous features”.
Nor could the easy pickings of Asia’s “luxuriant forests of the tropical belts” properly explain the relatively dramatic brain capacity suggested by the diminutive Taung skull. Dart’s real coup de grâce was that Africa, not Eurasia, had presented the bones in the opening credits of the proto-human biography. This was his missing link.Transitional humanity as a miscreant anthropoid with an awkward gait that preceded the curve of its unambitious forehead? From South Africa’s semi-dry backwaters no less? This was more than enough to set the teeth of European critics on edge. Largely steered by the English clique, European opposition dismissedoutright.
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