The Enigma of Raymond Dart

Raymond Dart (1893-1988) is famous for the 1925 discovery of the Taung cranium from South Africa he named Australopithecus africanus, and its identification as the first support for Darwin's hypothesis of the African ancestry of mankind. Dart's claims, first rejected, were later seen as one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. This formed one surviving part of a substantial corpus of wild claims made in Dart's writings. These included the taming of fire; the osteodontokeratic; cannibalism and the killer ape; Boskop man; work on racial origins; on exotic invaders into southern Africa from the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, and China; on …