of those who either didn’t know or didn’t care. And it is this last thought that appalls Dr. Shapiro, who reflects upon the dismay and sadness we would feel if we heard that Shakespeare’s manuscripts had been found, only to be burned by a maid who looked at them without comprehension.
In Africa it’s a different story, less tragic but more incredible because here we are concerned with men who supposedly knew what they were doing. The first important fossil turned up in Africa was contemptuously dismissed.
Momentous news is greeted like this more often than you would suspect. Einstein’s germinal bolt of lightning did not attract much notice for eight years. Francis Bacon anticipated Newton’s law of gravity by half a century, but the times were out of joint. The linguist Grotefend correctly deciphered an obscure cuneiform script and published his evidence in three reports, all of them ignored. Olaus Roemer, a seventeenth-century astronomer, discovered that light traveled at a fixed rate instead of propagating instantaneously, yet academic scientists rejected this idea for fifty years.
It happened again in 1924 when a Johannesburg anatomy professor named Raymond Dart reported on a miniature skull found in a limestone quarry near a railroad station called Taungs.
Two crates of fossil-bearing rock had been delivered to Professor Dart while he was getting dressed for the wedding of his friend Christo Beyers—“past international footballer and now senior lecturer in applied anatomy and operative surgery at the University of Witwatersrand.” Dart immediately opened both crates. The first was a disappointment; he saw nothing but petrified eggshells and turtle shells.
The second crate held a gem: nearly enclosed by rock was the skull.
Dart returned to it as soon as Beyers had been legally committed. With a hammer, a chisel, and one of Mrs. Dart’s knitting needles he set to work, delicately, because the little creature he meant to release had been imprisoned for almost a million years.
“No diamond cutter ever worked more lovingly or with such care on a priceless jewel,” he later wrote, “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, although the right side was still embedded. . . . 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 ever any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my ‘Taungs baby’ on that Christmas.”
The skull seemed to be that of a young ape, yet its cranium was too large—implying a large brain, a brain in which for the first time intellect might outweigh instinct—and its roundness suggested that the creature had walked erect. Dart estimated that when fully grown the baby would have been perhaps four feet tall and would have weighed about ninety pounds.
Cautiously he named it Australopithecus, Ape of the South; but in a paper for the British scientific journal Nature he pointed out certain human characteristics and indicated that his baby belonged in the family somewhere between Pongidae and Hominidae: “The specimen is of importance because it exhibits an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.”
Not so! Not so in the least! cried European authorities, none of whom had examined the South African infant.
“Professor Dart is not likely to be led astray,” commented the British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith. “If he has thoroughly examined the skull we are prepared to accept his decision.” But presently Sir Arthur changed his mind: “. . . one is inclined to place Australopithecus in the same group or sub-family as the chimpanzee and gorilla. It is an allied genus. It seems to be near akin to both.”
“There are serious doubts. . . .” wrote Smith-Woodward of Piltdown fame.
“. . . the distorted skull of a chimpanzee just over four years old, probably a female,” said Professor Arthur Robinson.
Not a hominid but an anthropoid ape, said Hans Weinert. Not a member of the human gallery, said Wilhelm Gieseler. Related to the gorilla, said Wolfgang Abel. And there were others. The consensus being that Dart’s child was a chimpanzee.
Only one ranking professional agreed with Dart. This was Dr. Robert Broom, who looked like everybody’s grandfather, who spoke with a Scottish burr, and who had become widely known—however implausible it may sound—for studying reptiles in the Great Karoo. He is described as a small, elderly gentleman who invariably wore a business suit with a high, starched collar, a black necktie, and a black hat. This was his uniform no matter where he happened to be, even in the bush. He was a medical doctor and part-time paleontologist who liked to collect things. In Ardrey’s eloquent phrase: “fossils, Rembrandt etchings, postage stamps, susceptible girls.”
A couple of weeks after Dr. Broom heard about the Taungs skull he came marching into Dart’s laboratory unannounced, ignored everybody, strode to the bench on which the skull rested, and dropped to his knees. He remained for the weekend as Dart’s houseguest and spent almost the entire time inspecting Australopithecus. He agreed that it was an intermediate form of life.
Because of Dr. Broom’s reputation the skull became famous, so famous that witty young men would ask: “Who was that girl I saw you with last night?—is she from Taungs?”
But along with the simpletons, as usually happens, a few intelligent people spoke up. An editorial in the London Observer concluded with these lines:
There must needs be some who will say that the discovery of a damaged skull in subtropical Africa makes no difference. Admittedly it does not affect us materially like the discovery of wireless or electric light. The difference is in outlook. The stimulus to all progress is man’s innate belief that he can grasp the scheme of things or his place therein. But this stimulus compels him to track his career backward to its first beginnings as well as to carry it forward to its ultimate end. The more clearly he sees whence he has come the more clearly he will discern whither he is bound. Hence it is not an accident that an age of immense scientific advance produced Darwin with his Theory of Origins, or that a later period of social unrest has stimulated archaeologists to reveal the strength of the social tradition. Viewed in some such intellectual context as this, the Taungs skull is at once a reminder of limitations and an encouragement to further endeavour. Its importance, significant in itself, is enhanced by the fact that its message has been preserved through unimaginable ages for discovery here and now.
The Observer’s thoughtful opinion did not convince everybody. Letters from around the world arrived at Dart’s office, warning him vociferously, emphatically, with magisterial certainty, that he would roast in Hell. The London Times printed a sharp rebuke, addressed to Dart, from a woman who signed herself “Plain but Sane”:
“How can you, with such a wonderful gift of God-given genius—not the gift of a monkey, but a trust from the Almighty—become a traitor to your Creator by making yourself the active agent of Satan and his ready tool? What does your Master pay you for trying to undermine God’s word? . . . What will it profit you? The wages of the master you serve is death. Why not change over? What will evolution do for you when dissolution overtakes you?”
And, regardless of evolution or dissolution, Profit was much on the mind of a gentleman who owned property in Sterkfontein, northeast of Taungs, for he issued a pamphlet with this invitation:
“Come to Sterkfontein and find the missing link!”
Given any conversation about men, apes, evolution, and all that, somebody inevitably will use the phrase missing link, often as a derisive question: “Why can’t they find it?”—followed by hostile laughter. The unmistakable inference being that the link can’t be found because it never existed, which proves
