Prof. Raymond Arthur Dart, SA anthropologist and expert on the Taung skull, dies in Sandton, Johannesburg

Raymond Dart was born in Queensland Australia in 1893. One of nine siblings, he grew up on a farm herding cattle. He won a scholarship to study at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and later went on to study medicine in Sydney. Upon graduating, Dart travelled to England to serve in the medical corps in World War I. Dart left England for South Africa in 1922, where he became professor of Anatomy at the newly formed University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. When a fossil of a skull was found in the Taung region, Dart examined the skull and determined that the skull, named the Taung Baby, was a cross between ape and man. This claim, though initially accepted, was later rejected in light of a comparison to the Piltdown man, another fossil skull that had been found earlier. It was determined that the Piltdown man was more manlike and that the Taung Baby was merely an ape. Dart had named the Taung skull the Australopithecus africanus, and in the late 1940’s he was vindicated when it was finally accepted in the science world that australopithecines were hominids. He died in 1988 at the age 95.