It is almost 50 years to the day that Nature published a report by Dr Raymond Dart describing the face, jaw and the brain case of a child belonging to what Dart described as “an extinct race of apes, intermediate between anthropoids and man”. Nowadays, though chance and perspicacity still count in the search for hominid fossils, the scene has shifted from South to East Africa. The size of the cast has increased and both the extent of backstage support and the scale of the budget reflect the fact that hominid research has changed a good deal in the past half century. Bernard Wood reports.
