Some of the more colorful ideas and text in the anthropological literature are courtesy of Raymond Dart.
Dart, hammering away at some breccia to remove a fossil. I hope. Image credit.
In 1925, Dart identified the Taung fossil as a close relative of humans, and coined the scientific name, Australopithecus africanus. This was a pretty good idea, as Taung was the first in what is now a large collection of fossils attributed to this species.
Taung was such an important discovery, you can now walk across it not once, not twice, but thrice! as you enter the fossil collections at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits University
Some of Dart’s ideas that made it into print, though, were a bit more fanciful. Aside from his description of Taung, he is probably most famous for hypothesizing the “osteodontokeratic” culture, the idea that the myriad broken animal bones in Makapansgat cave were in fact tools used by australopiths for hunting and murder. MURDER! It was a neat idea at the time, but his vision of bloodthirsty, bone-dagger-wielding australopithecines is not accepted today (nor back when he was writing).
Dart was trained as an anatomist, and much of his work was devoted to writing up australopithecine fossils discovered at site of Makapansgat in South Africa. These are probably the best descriptive papers I’ve found in all the literature, as Dart’s whimsical visions of violence and bloodshed occasionally made their way into otherwise dry scientific prose.
In 1948 he very casually put it out there, that the front teeth of the MLD 2 mandible were lost in “fatal combat . . . presumably by a bludgeon” (emphasis added). Of course, the teeth were probably lost long after the poor kid died, rather than being knocked out “at the hands of a kinsman more expert than himself in the accurate application of directed implements” (Dart, 1948: 393-394). But Dart’s version is certainly more interesting than the more likely taphonomic explanation.
The MLD 2 mandible, poor kid, as illustrated in Dart (1948). Note that the incisor tooth sockets are empty, likely the result of taphonomy rather than bloodsport.
Dart (1958) later described the MLD 7 ilium, which he’d presumed to be a female, from the same site as MLD 2. Dart recounted the violent demise of MLD 2, raising the possibility of a similar death for the MLD 7 individual: “The adolescent boy [MLD 2] … was killed by a bone-smashing blow on the chin from a club or fist. Did brother and sister share here in death the same cannibalistic fate?” (emphasis added) Bloodshed, cannibalism, Australopithecus according to Dart had it all. Although these are unlikely characterizations of australopithecines, there is evidence of cannibalism in later fossil humans.
These gruesome Easter Eggs come to mind as I’m reading his 1956 paper about brain evolution. Here, Dart (1956: 28) says that hominins began walking on two legs after a dietary shift: “The forest-loving vegetarian anthropoids clung to their four-handed climbing and fruit while the terrestrial predaceous australopithecines, depending on their speed of foot and deftness of hand, lusted after flesh!” (emphasis added) Today, this idea would simply be written as, monkeys and apes live in trees and eat fruits while australopithecines lived on the ground and ate meat. But Raymond Dart wouldn’t stand for this. Oh no.
My grad school advisor, Milford Wolpoff, used to lament that students today don’t want to read anything older than the past 5-10 years. But Dart is a shining example of some of the rewarding Easter Eggs that await those who dig deeper into the literature. [I’m reminded also of Don Cousins describing “the colossal poundage of the lowland gorilla ‘Phil,’ who lived in the St. Louis Zoo from 1941-1958″ (1972: 269, emphasis added].
Some good, older stuff
Cousins D (1972). Body measurements and weights of wild and captive gorillas, Gorilla gorilla. Zoologische Garten NF Leipzig 41, 261-277.
Dart, RA (1925). Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa Nature, 115 (2884), 195-199 DOI: 10.1038/115195a0
Dart, RA (1948). The adolescent mandible of Australopithecus prometheus American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 6 (4), 391-412 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330060410
Dart RA (1956). The relationships of brain size and brain pattern to human status. The South African Journal of Medical Sciences, 21 (1-2), 23-45 PMID: 13380551
Dart, RA (1958). A further adolescent australopithecine ilium from Makapansgat American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 16 (4), 473-479 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330160407
Lawn Chair Anthropology 
Thannk you for being you