Raymond Arthur Dart, anatomist and palaeo-anthropologist, was the son of Samuel Dart, a storekeeper, and his wife Eliza Ann, born Brimblecombe. He received his secondary education at Ipswich Grammar School and from 1911 studied at the University of Queensland in Brisbane where he excelled as a sportsman and was awarded the degrees BSc (1914) with honours in biology, and MSc (1916). Continuing his studies in medicine at the University of Sydney he qualified as MB and ChM (Hons, 1917) and later as MD (1927). In 1918-1919, during the latter part of World War I (1914-1918), he served as a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps in England and France. When the war ended he was in England and became a senior demonstrator in anatomy at University College, London, for a year. He had by that time decided that anatomical research would be his life's calling and published his first paper, "A contribution to the morphology of the corpus striatum" (Journal of Anatomy, 1920). During 1920-1921 he spent a year in the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, mainly at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. After a further period at University College, London, he moved to South Africa in January 1923 as professor of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, succeeding Professor E. P. Stibbe*. He has been described as "The man who put the medical school, and indeed the university, truly on the map" (Murray, 1982, p. 179).
In November 1924 Dart received a fossil skull that had been found in a great sheet of sandy limestone being quarried by the Northern Lime Company at Taungs (now Taung), in North West province. After removing the calcified matrix in which it was embedded an almost complete face was revealed, extending from lower jaw to forehead, with a natural cast of the brain complete on one side from frontal to occipital poles, fitting comfortably in place behind the frontal bone. He found that the skull was that of a child approximately five years old. with a mixture of human and ape-like features. The head had been held on an almost vertical spinal column and the teeth, especially the canines, were human like. While the brain was small like that of an ape, its form appeared to be human-like in its parietal lobe. On the basis of these mixed features Dart regarded the child as the supposed missing link between human and non-human animals and named it Australopithecus africanus. His findings were published in Nature in February 1925, but his interpretation of the skull was rejected by most scholars. The accepted wisdom at the time was that the "missing link" should come from Asia, rather than from Africa; that brain enlargement must have been an early step in human evolution; and that the child was too young to predict its likely adult form. Dart's tendency to be brash and heretical in the face of scientific orthodoxies did not help either. However, in time similar fossils were found by palaeontologist Robert Broom*, including adult specimens at Sterkfontein (1936) and Kromdraai (1938) and after some 25 years of debate Dart's interpretation of the skull was generally accepted. Broom considered that Dart had made one of the greatest discoveries in the world's history, while Tobias (1990) considered Dart's recognition and interpretation of the significance of Australopithecus as one of the great steps forward in the history of palaeoanthropology.
Another major contribution by Dart was based on a few dozen fossil remains of Australopithecus and a large collection of broken, fossilised antelope bones found in a cave deposit at Makapansgat, an archaeological site northeast of Mokopane in Limpopo province, shortly after the close of World War II (1939-1945). After an intensive study of the animal remains he proposed a revolutionary hypothesis, namely that the Makapansgat hominids had collected, fashioned and used some of the bones, teeth and horn-cores to kill animals for eating. His views were developed, and several dozen new hominid fossils documented, in a long series of research reports published between 1948 and 1962 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and in a book published as a memoir of the Transvaal Museum, The Osteodontokeratic Culture of Australopithecus Prometheus (1957). Once again his views were highly controversial and have been largely rejected, but they stimulated the development of taphonomy - a new scientific discipline that studies the impact of physical and biotic agencies on bone.
From his arrival in South Africa Dart was interested in the archaeological, ethnological and physical anthropological problems of Africa as a whole. In 1930 he was a member of the Italian African Scientific Expedition, led by Commander Attilio Gatti and together with Signor Nino del Grande excavated the cultural sequence of Mumbwa Cave in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). The expedition travelled widely in the Congo (now the DRC) and provided Dart with an opportunity to observe the living anthropoid apes in their natural habitat. There he left the expedition and traveled overland to Cairo and visited Italy, France and the United Kingdom.
In 1936 he participated in a comprehensive physical anthropological study of the physical features of a group of southern San (Bushmen). The results were published in Bushmen of the Southern Kalahari (1937). He recognized similarities between the robust constitution of some of the living individuals and the prehistoric Boskopoid strain he had earlier postulated on the basis of remains found at Boskop, just north of Potchefstroom (1913), and Tsitsikamma in the Eastern Cape (1923). He also contributed the chapter on "Racial origins" to the classic publication by I. Shapera, The Bantu-speaking tribes of South Africa (1959). His numerous publications also dealt with his anatomical, neurological, medical, historical, biographical and autobiographical contributions. It may be claimed that he effected a revolution in knowledge about the place of humans in nature and that he triggered the foundation of a new scientific discipline (Tobias, 1990).
Dart was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa in 1930, served on its council in 1938 and as vice-president during 1938-1940 and 1950-1951. He was a Fellow also of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1925 he served as president of Section E (which included anthropology) of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, received the association's South Africa Medal (gold) in 1939 and was elected as president for 1953-1954. In 1950 he was president of the South African Archaeological Society and delivered his presidential address on "Serological patterns and human migrations". He had a charismatic personality and a kindly and forthright manner, and stimulated many students to follow careers in biomedical science. His stimulating spirit has been the most memorable feature of the impact he had on those around him and a long series of his assistants and research students attained later eminence. From 1925 to 1943 he was dean of the Faculty of Medicine and played a leading role in the growth and development of the faculty. From 1934 to 1948 he represented the University of the Witwatersrand on the South African Medical and Dental Council. He was also a member of the council of the South African Institute for Medical Research for many years and served on various other boards and committees. He was awarded honorary doctoral degrees by the University of Natal (DSc, 1956) and the University of the Witwatersrand (1965). Over the years he visited many countries in Europe and North America and received various honours and awards. He retired as professor of anatomy at the end of 1958, but from 1966 to 1986 spent six months each year teaching and researching at the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On 3 September 1921, while in the United States, he married Dora Tyree, an instructor in anatomy, but they were divorced in 1936. On 20 November 1936 he married Marjorie Gordon Frew in Johannesburg. He had a son and a daughter.
