Raymond A. Dart

Raymond A. Dart (born February 4, 1893, Toowong, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia—died November 22, 1988, Johannesburg, South Africa) was an Australian-born South African physical anthropologist and paleontologist whose discoveries of fossil hominins (members of the human lineage) led to significant insights into human evolution.

In 1924, at a time when Asia was believed to have been the cradle of mankind, Dart’s recognition of the humanlike features of the Taung skull, recovered in South Africa near the great Kalahari desert, substantiated Charles Darwin’s prediction that such ancestral hominin forms would be found in Africa. Dart made the skull the type specimen of a new genus and species, Australopithecus africanus, or “southern ape of Africa.” His claim that a creature with an ape-sized brain could have dental and postural characteristics approaching those of humans initially met with hostile skepticism because his theory entailed the principle of mosaic evolution, or the development of some characteristics in advance of others. His claim also differed sharply from the mosaicist position of Elliot Smith, who held that hominization began with an enlarged cranial capacity. Nevertheless, Dart lived to see his theories corroborated by further discoveries of Australopithecus remains at Makapansgat in South Africa in the late 1940s and by the subsequent discoveries of Louis Leakey, which firmly established Africa as the site of mankind’s earliest origins.

Dart studied at the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney. From 1923 to 1958 he taught on the faculty of medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where the Institute for the Study of Mankind in Africa was founded in his honour.