Experts and australopithecines : credibility and controversy in the science of human evolution, 1924-1959

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 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 scienc