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UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Experts and australopithecines : credibility and controversy in the science of human evolution, 1924-1959 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zd1k4tk Author Richmond Jesse, Richmond Jesse Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Experts and Australopithecines: Credibility and Controversy in the Science of Human Evolution, 1924-1959 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History (Science Studies) by Jesse Richmond Committee in charge: Professor Naomi Oreskes, Chair Professor Cathy Gere Professor Tal Golan Professor Steve Epstein Professor Martha Lampland 2009 Copyright Jesse Richmond, 2009 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Jesse Richmond is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2009 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………..... iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………….... iv List of Figures ………………………………………………………………. v Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………... vii Vita………………………………………………………………………….. viii Abstract……………………………………………………………………… ix Introduction………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1 – Australopithecus as Dart’s Ambition, Part I……………………. 21 Chapter 2 – Australopithecus as Dart’s Ambition, Part II…………………… 65 Chapter 3 – Australopithecus as Broom’s Mission………………………….. 98 Chapter 4 – Measuring Australopithecus……………………………………. 143 Chapter 5 – Classifying Australopithecus …………………………………… 188 Chapter 6 – Australopithecus as Dart’s Ambition, Part III………………….. 233 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………. 271 Bibliography………………………………………………………………….. 283 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: A frontal view of the Taung Skull from Dart’s 1925 article……………………………………………………… 32 Figure 1.2: Dart’s tracing showing the position of brain fissures in the endocranial cast of the Taung skull……………… 34 Figure 1.3: Broom’s phylogeny of apes and humans……………………….. 43 Figure 2.1: Keith’s 1929 diagram showing both his and Dart’s view of the phylogenic position of Australopithecus …………… 91 Figures 3.1 & 3.2: Broom’s propagandistic illustrations……………………. 101 Figure 3.3: Broom’s 1936 sketch of Australopithecus , next to which he scrawled the words “Probable proportions”………….. 113 Figure 3.4: Variations on Gregory’s “Dryopithecus pattern” of molar cusps…………………………………………………… 120 Figure 3.5: Broom’s 1937 phylogeny of humans and their near relations……………………………………………………. 121 Figure 3.6: Broom’s 1941 phylogeny of human and their near relations……………………………………………………. 129 Figures 3.7 to 3.9: Broom’s frontal view sketches of the type specimens of Australopithecus, Plesianthropus, and Paranthropus , respectively, with the known parts shaded and the rest inferred …………………………. 133 Figure 3.10: Broom’s comparison of his 1946 revised phylogeny with those of Osborn, Keith and Gregory………………………... 135 Figure 4.1: Arambourg’s phylogeny of the Primates from the 1947 Pan-African Congress………………………………………... 151 Figure 4.2: Clark’s comparison of the os innomatum (hip bone) of an A) Orangutan, B) Chimpanzee, C) Gorilla, D) Australopithecine and E) Human………………………………. 153 v Figure 4.3: A sample page from the second part of Ashton and Zuckerman’s statistical study, showing the P values for comparisons between the teeth of Plesianthropus and those of living apes………………………….. 165 Figure 4.4: Clark’s comparison of two Australopithecine milk canines and first premolars (a and b) with those of ten chimpanzees…………………………………………………… 167 Figure 4.5: Clark’s 1955 phylogeny of the Hominidae ……………………….. 184 Figure 5.1: Robinson’s phylogeny of the “prehominids” and “euhominids”………………………………………………….. 212 Figures 6.1 to 6.7: Drawings of Dart’s imagined uses for various osteodontokeratic specimens from Makapansgat…………………………………………. 255 Figure 6.8: A photograph of several of the actual specimens from the Makapansgat limeworks…………………………………. 256 Figures 6.9 to 6.12: Drawings of imagined scenes of Australopithecine life from Dart’s 1959 memoir……………………………………………………. 268 Figure 6.13: Dart demonstrating the use of a scapula as a weapon……………. 269 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge Professor Naomi Oreskes for her encouragement and support as my dissertation supervisor and chair of my committee. Her confidence in me kept me afloat when I risked drowning under the weight of my own self-doubt. Further, I would like to thank the faculty and students in the Division of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, especially Professor Greg Radick, for welcoming into their fold during my time researching and writing in England. Similarly, the faculty, staff, and students in the Department of Anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School gave me invaluable support while researching in Johannesburg. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my family – Lisa, Joery, and Annie – without whom I could not have endured the hours of the day, let alone produced a major piece of historical research. Figures 1.1-1.3, 3.5-3.6, and 4.4 are reproduced with permission from the Nature Publishing Group. Figures 3.7-3.10 and 6.1-6.8 are reproduced with permission from the Transvaal Museum (Pretoria, South Africa). Figure 4.2 is reproduced with permission from the Geological Society of London. Figure 4.3 is reproduced with permission from the Royal Society of London. Figure 4.5 is reproduced with permission from the University of Chicago Press. vii VITA 2001 Bachelor of Arts (Honors), University of British Columbia 2002 Master of Arts, University of Toronto 2003-2004 Teaching Assistant, Revelle College Humanities Program, University of California, San Diego 2009 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego PUBLICATIONS “Design and Dissent: Religion, Authority, and the Scientific Spirit of Robert Broom,” Isis , vol.100 no.3, 485-504, September 2009. viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Experts and Australopithecines: Credibility and Controversy in the Science of Human Evolution, 1924-1959 By Jesse Richmond Doctor of Philosophy in History (Science Studies) University of California, San Diego, 2009 Professor Naomi Oreskes, Chair This dissertation investigates debates in the early and middle parts of the twentieth century over the significance of the Australopithecine fossils discovered in South Africa. The initial specimen, famously known as the “Taung Child”, was characterized by Raymond Dart in 1925 as a possible evolutionary ancestor of human beings, linking our species to a distant past in which our anatomical similarity to the apes was much more conspicuous. Most of the recognized scientific authorities disagreed with Dart’s assessment, instead seeing the specimen as a mere extinct ape, without any special place in ix humankind’s evolutionary history. My narrative examines the debates that ensued over the next three and a half decades, closely following the changing credibility of Dart’s initial claim, as well as subsequent claims by Dart and other scientists about the Australopithecines, through the shifting networks of objects, texts, people, practices and institutions that made up the infrastructure of paleoanthropological knowledge. The narrative demonstrates that the determinants of credibility in the Australopithecine debates were strongly tied to the particulars of local circumstances and personal relationships, and cannot be reduced to any normative, a priori account of how credibility is or ought to be achieved in science. x Introduction Undoubtedly, one of the main factors responsible for the frequency with which polemics enter into controversies on matters of paleo- anthropology is a purely emotional one. It is a fact (which it were well to recognize) that it is extraordinarily difficult to view with complete objectivity the evidence for our own evolutionary origin, no doubt because the problem is such a very personal problem. Even scientists of today may not find it easy to clear their minds entirely of an emotional element when they come to consider the evidence in detail, and this emotional element is only too frequently betrayed by the phraseology with which disputants claim with equal insistence to be assessing the same evidence dispassionately. - Wilfred E. Le Gros Clark, “Bones of Contention,” Huxley Memorial Lecture, delivered November 28, 1958 1 The distinguished British anatomist and anthropologist Sir W.E. Le Gros Clark opened his 1958 Huxley Memorial Lecture by pointing to what he perceived as the peculiar character of paleoanthropology – the scientific study of human evolution – among the sciences. For a century, every fossil discovery that could potentially be taken as evidence of an evolutionary connection between human beings and some “lower form” had precipitated a large number of mutually contradictory interpretations from ostensibly authoritative voices, often wildly divergent in their assessments of the fossil’s significance. More often than not, and certainly more often than Clark took to be the norm in most scientific fields, this proliferation of views had descended into “controversies of a polemical nature.” 2 1 Subsequently published as Clark, “Bones of Contention” (quote from p.132). 2 Ibid., p.131. 1 2 Clark identified one major culprit in paleoanthropology’s pattern of contentiousness – and this was an issue of culpability, for the continuance