DART, RAYMOND A(RTHUR)

born Feb. 4, 1893, Toowong, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia died Nov. 22, 1988, Johannesburg, S.Af. Australian-born South African physical anthropologist and paleontologist whose discoveries of fossil hominids led to significant insights into the evolutionary origins of human beings. 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 hominid forms would be found in Africa. Dart made the skull the type-specimen of a new genus and species, Australopithecus africanus. 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 australopithecine remains at Makapansgat in South Africa in the late 1940s and by the subsequent discoveries of L.S.B. 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 Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa was founded in his honour.