Raymond Dart

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Raymond Dart, 1968

Raymond Arthur Dart (born February 4, 1893 in Toowong near Brisbane , Australia , † November 22, 1988 in Sandton , Johannesburg , South Africa ) was an Australian anatomist and paleoanthropologist . He gained fame through the first description of the " Child of Taung ", the fossil skull of a young prehistoric man , which a quarry worker discovered in 1924 near the town of Taung in northwestern South Africa.

Life

family

Dart was the son of the farmer and dealer Samuel Dart and Eliza Ann Brimblecombe. In 1921 he married Dora Tyree. After the divorce, he married on November 11, 1936 the assistant Marjorie Gordon Frew, whom he had met at Witwatersrand University. Dart has a daughter named Diana Elizabeth and a son named Galen Alexander.

education

Raymond Dart studied medicine, first at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and later at the University of Sydney . After he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1913 and a Master of Science degree in 1915, he also received a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelors of Medicine and Surgery in 1917 . He then went to England, where he served in a medical service until the end of the First World War . He then continued his studies at the University of London , where from 1920 he became assistant to Grafton Elliot Smith , who held the chair of anatomy at University College London . Smith was then the most respected neuroanatomist in the country and was later knighted for his achievements. Through Smith, Raymond Dart also got access to the equally important - and later ennobled - anatomist Arthur Keith . Because of their anatomical knowledge, both researchers were also key figures among British anthropologists.

Dart was by no means enthusiastic when Elliot Smith suggested to him in 1922 that he should apply for the newly established chair of anatomy at the Medical School of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg . He would have much preferred to continue to work near his two sponsors rather than in a "terrible place" in South Africa. However, he followed her advice that a temporary stay would be beneficial to his academic career and left England in late 1922.

The "child of Taung"

The "child of Taung", replica

At the end of November 1924, Dart received fossils that had been found in the South African quarry Buxton near Taung . He recognized the remains of a young hominid in a skull , which had been preserved along with the lower jaw , deciduous teeth and a natural cast of the skull interior. As early as January 1925, Dart sent the first description of the " Child of Taung " to the British journal Nature , and it was published the following month. Dart named the genus Australopithecus ("southern monkey") and the species Australopithecus africanus ("southern monkey from Africa"). Dart assumed that the bones found in Taung, especially smaller animals such as baboons , springboks , rodents , birds and turtles , were the remains of the Australopithecus' food , meaning that it was a carnivore. He also pointed to the skull traumas of the baboons, which he attributed to Australopithecus .

Makapansgat Limeworks

In the 1920s, a local teacher, Wilfried Eitzman, pointed out the findings from the Makapansgat cave to darts . Some of these bones appeared to be burned. An excavation by Phillip Tobias , then a student at the Witwatersrand University , produced further finds. From 1946 Dart had the overburden of the lime burners searched, and hominid fossils were discovered, which Dart published in 1948 as Australopithecus prometheus ; today these finds are also assigned to Australopithecus africanus . All finds from Makapansgat cannot be assigned to any datable find layer and without any context .

The hunting hypothesis

Based on the finds from Makapansgat, Dart postulated that bones, teeth and horns were used by Australopithecus africanus for hunting ( osteodontokeratic culture ). In 1953 in a specialist article and in 1959 in his memoir Adventures with the missing link , Dart interpreted the numerous bone finds of various animal species as prey of the australopithecines , speculated about joint hunts of the early hominids and derived far-reaching conclusions about the mechanisms of human development. The American playwright Robert Ardrey popularized this model - the hunt as the key to becoming human - a little later by describing the ancestors of Homo sapiens as bloodthirsty beings who killed and ate other hominids in his successful book "African Genesis" . Dart's train of thought was also taken up by the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke , whose novel version 2001: A Space Odyssey, created jointly with Stanley Kubrick, contains the well-known scene with the thighbone- wielding prehistoric man , which is also in Kubrick's film 2001: Odyssey in Space occurs. Inge Schröder from the Anthropological Institute of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel described this reading of the accompanying finds from the Makapan caves as outdated in 1989: “Today one suspects that the idea of ​​an inherent, tribal-historically anchored tendency towards cruelty and killing also from the confrontation with the horrors and atrocities of World War II . "

literature

  • Raymond A. Dart: Australopithecus africanus: the man-ape of South Africa . (PDF; 456 kB) In: Nature . Volume 115, 1925, pp. 195-199
  • Phillip V. Tobias : Conversion in Palaeo-Anthropology: The Role of Robert Broom, Sterkfontein and other Factors in Australopithecine Acceptance. In: Phillip Tobias, Michael A. Raath, Jacopo Moggi ‐ Cecchi and Gerald A. Doyle (eds.): Humanity from African naissance to coming millennia. Firenze University Press, Florence 2001, pp. 13–31, ISBN 978-88-8453-003-5 , full text (PDF)
  • Roger Lewin: Bones of Contention. Controversies in the Search for Human Origins. Touchstone 1988, ISBN 0-671-66837-4
  • CK Brain: Raymond Dart - the Provocative Pioneer of African Cave Taphonomy. Chapter 1 in: Breathing Live into Fossils. Taphonomic Studies in Honor of CK (Bob) Brain. Stone Age Institute, 2004, pp. 2-5, full text

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ South African History Online: Prof. Raymond Arthur Dart ... At: sahistory.org.za , accessed on July 26, 2015 (English)
  2. ↑ according to his own statement to R. Lewin, p. 50
  3. ^ CK Brain, Fifty Years of Fun with Fossils. In: T. Pickering et al. , Breathing live into Fossils: Taphonomic studies in Honor of Bob Brain. Gosport 2007, p. 2
  4. ^ CK Brain, Fifty Years of Fun with Fossils. In: T. Pickering et al., Breathing live into Fossils: Taphonomic studies in Honor of Bob Brain. Gosport 2007, p. 3
  5. ^ R. Dart: The predatory transition from ape to man. International Anthropological and Linguistic Review, 1, 1953, pp. 201-219
  6. ^ Raymond A. Dart, Dennis Craig: Adventures with the missing link. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1959
  7. ^ Robert Ardrey: African Genesis. 1961; German: Adam came from Africa. In search of our ancestors. Vienna, Nymphenburger, 1967, ISBN 3-485-00605-X ; as dtv paperback: 1969.
  8. ^ Lydia Pyne: The Taung Child: The Rise of a Folk Hero . Chapter 3 in: Dies .: Seven Skeletons. The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils. Viking, New York 2016, p. 109, ISBN 978-0-525-42985-2
  9. ↑ From toolmaker to scavenger: Concepts of the Incarnation as reflected in the history of science Lecture by Dr. Inge Schröder, Anthropological Institute of Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel
personal data
SURNAME Darts, Raymond
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dart, Raymond Arthur (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian anatomist, paleoanthropologist, educator, editor and author
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Toowong
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1988
Place of death Johannesburg