In 1926, Louis Leakey began what became a successful, multi-generational research enterprise in Kenya. The author of numerous historical books on Africa, Meredith here offers a social history of 20th-century anthropological exploration in Africa, one that gives flavor to both the significance of new discoveries and the charismatic personalities who made them. In “ Born in Africa,” journalist and historian Martin Meredith has compiled a satisfying account of this quest. A gold rush of anthropological exploration in Africa followed, its history marked by bitter rivalries, brash pronouncements and breathtaking discoveries. The Piltdown skull was only a few hundred years old the Taung Child, however, was eventually dated at 2.7 million years.īroom’s discoveries finally turned the tide of scientific opinion toward accepting humanity’s origins in Africa. In 1953, scientists confirmed that Piltdown Man had been an elaborate 40-year hoax, a skull patched together from a combination of human and orangutan remains and artificially distressed to appear ancient. Twenty-three years later, Robert Broom, a maverick fossil hunter and physician who conducted his South African excavations under the blazing sun dressed “in a dark suit and waistcoat, long-sleeved white shirt, stiff butterfly collar and somber tie,” made his own discovery of an australopithecine, finally vindicating Dart. Among Dart’s other crimes were failing to follow proper research protocol and using “a ‘barbarous’ combination of Latin and Greek in naming the specimen Australopithecus.” After this professional drubbing, Dart suffered a nervous breakdown, and the Taung skull languished for years as a paperweight on the desk of a colleague. Yet the conservative scientific establishment savaged him, arguing that he had misidentified a mere primate.

With its large cranium but otherwise apelike features, Piltdown Man supposedly represented the missing link between primates and humans, proving that humans came out of Asia and not Africa.ĭart disagreed, and he enthusiastically published his findings. Confirming this belief was the 1912 discovery of Piltdown Man, a skull found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England.

But Dart’s finding contradicted prevailing scientific opinion, which held that the evolution of a large brain preceded other human adaptations, such as walking. Despite its small brain size, the Taung Child, as the skull was to be named, had distinctively human features, including signs that its owner walked upright. In 1924, anatomy professor Raymond Dart came across an unusual skull that a mining company had inadvertently blasted out of a hillside in a South African village.

The fate of africa by martin meredith