Raymond Dart

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See Raymond Dart in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Raymond Dart (1893-1988) was an influential anatomist and paleoanthropologist at South Africa's University of Witwatersrand. In 1925 he described Australopithecus africanus, the "Taung child", in the journal Nature. Despite the initial skepticism of his claim that Australopithecus was a hominid (with the exception of Robert Broom, who remained a strong supporter) in light of the discrepancies between his specimen and "Piltdown man", described shortly before, Dart eventually won the academic concensus in the 1940's after a series of additional discoveries.