Keith called Dart’s hypothesis preposterous, declaring Dart too inexperienced to know what he was really examining—just a juvenile ape, according to Keith. The Royal Society refused to publish Dart’s detailed 269-page manuscript on the fossil. Dart’s colleague in South Africa, Robert Broom, wrote in 1950, “[the] English culture treats him as if he had been a naughty schoolboy.”
By the time the Swanscombe fossil was recovered, Dart had stepped back from paleoanthropological research due to the emotional wounds suffered from the scathing reception of the Taung Child. Despite being a brilliant neuroanatomist, uniquely suited to study Swanscombe, Dart did not assess the skull. Had he, perhaps the fossil’s likely identity as a Neanderthal ancestor would have been known long ago.
It took an additional two decades of fossil discovery in South Africa before Keith admitted in a 1947 letter to Nature “Dart was right and … I was wrong,” about the centrality of Africa to our human story.
Though Dart was eventually vindicated, I found it unsettling to read how the biases and geopolitics of people like Keith shaped the research landscape. Because Keith didn’t think he was biased. He thought he was doing rigorous science. He had all the training, all the anatomical expertise. From inside his own head, he was the careful, objective one, and Dart was an inexperienced upstart, a traitor to his intellectual English heritage.
As I sat in a similar institution to Keith, working on the same material, I wondered: How do these intellectual roots influence my work as a paleoanthropologist in 2025?
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In some ways, the 1930s paleoanthropology I read about felt alien. For example, unlike 90 years ago, at the London Natural History Museum today, we complete training in unconscious bias, have flourishing support groups for underrepresented identity groups, and celebrate diversity of nature and humanity alike.
Yet in some ways, my field that studies fossil ancestors felt fossilized.
In 1935, British institutions wielded the power to elevate or suppress research. Ninety years later, several leading research institutions exist outside the Euro-American sphere, such as the National Museums of Kenya and Tanzania, and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. Nevertheless, intellectual and financial power remain concentrated in Euro-American institutions, which continue to lead excavations in countries that were once European colonies. Research collaborations, funding, and access to specimens and technology continue to be negotiated within a colonialist, power-imbalanced context.
