Aztec Treasure House. Evan S. Connell
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 that Archbishop Ussher must have been right. Oh, not 4004 B.C. exactly, but once upon a time the clouds split with a blinding flash, a huge Anglo-Saxon finger pointed down, and immediately the earth was populated with dinosaurs and cavemen. And if, let’s say, a bona fide living breathing furry link could in fact be produced—a specimen undeniably half-and-half—you may be sure it would be angrily rejected, identified either as a peculiar chimpanzee or as a hairy little man with rickets.
The skull seems to be the determining factor. If the skull looks reasonably human—well then, the owner must have been human. Otherwise it was some sort of ape.
Consider the brow, the jaw, the dome. Especially the dome. Is it high, capacious, handsomely rounded?—a suitable receptacle for a human brain? If so, we have Man. Hominidae. Glory of the universe.
Does it resemble a football?—flattened, unimposing, diminutive? Then we have Pongidae, brute keeper of the forest.
The problem with such attractive and shapely logic may be illustrated by the fact that Lord Byron’s brain measured 2,350 cubic centimeters while that of Anatole France measured just 1,100. It should follow, therefore, that Lord Byron was at least twice as intelligent as Anatole France. You see the brambles on this path.
Besides, the average cranial capacity of Cro-Magnon skulls is 1,650 cubic centimeters while that of modern Europeans is about 1,400—which implies that the human brain is shrinking. It could be. And perhaps for the best.
But this leads in another direction, so let’s return to the Transvaal, to Professor Dart patiently sifting the earth for additional scraps of Australopithecus.
In the Makapan valley he discovered where a troop of these “chimpanzees” had stopped, and the campsite revealed gruesome proof of human behavior—an assortment of baboon skulls together with that of another Australopithecus child. The jaw of each baboon skull, as well as that of the child, had been broken in such a way as to suggest a feast. Chimpanzees customarily eat plants and fruit, not baboons, nor do adult chimps eat their own children. So, Dart reasoned, these creatures a million years ago were evolving rapidly.
He showed his skull collection to an expert in forensic medicine who told him that the Australo infant and forty-two baboons had been dispatched by powerful blows with a hard object. Dart suspected that the hard object, or objects, might still be around. Presently he found them: antelope leg bones. In some instances a particular bone could be fitted to the break in a particular skull. The fragile, porcelain-thin skulls of infant baboons had been emptied of their brains, then crushed and tossed aside, says Dart, just as a human child might crush and throw away a breakfast eggshell.
He published an article about these carnivorous Transvaal citizens in 1949, and being a scientist he gave it an appropriate title: “The Predatory Implemental Techniques of Australopithecus.” Very few people who read it liked it.
Six years later a scientific congress met at the town of Livingstone near Victoria Falls. Dart was allotted twenty minutes, which meant he scarcely had time to summarize what he had learned. His talk seems to have been ignored. Many of the scientists did not bother to look at the exhibit he had prepared. Those skulls could not have been fractured by our ancestors. Probably a band of hyenas killed the baboons. Or some leopards. Or it could be that porcupines, which occasionally collect bones to chew on—porcupines might be responsible.
Said von Koenigswald, speaking for most of the Establishment: “It is easy to take such bones for implements, and this is in fact often done. But a comparison of the picture produced by Dart shows without any doubt that these bones have been gnawed and split by hyenas.”
However, a British paleontologist named Sutcliffe who had spent a great deal of time studying hyenas did not agree. He said it would be uncharacteristic of hyenas to leave all those skulls around. Hyenas pulverize everything. Then, too, some rudimentary “tools” were unearthed in the Australo encampment, and the shaping of implements for a specific purpose is a trait that distinguishes Homo sapiens from beasts.
Rather cautiously the professionals began revising their opinion of Dart’s exhibit.
Meanwhile, Dr. Broom had been attracted to the Sterkfontein lime-works where some fossils were turning up. The plant manager, Mr. Barlow, previously had worked at Taungs and he now understood that there were commodities other than lime; he was gathering fossils and selling them to tourists. Through him Dr. Broom got a few interesting bones, though nothing