Raymond Dart did not want the job as head of the Department of Anatomy in Johannesburg. Aged 29 in 1922, Dart was enjoying the patronage of Grafton Elliot Smith in his laboratory at University College, London. After graduating from university in Sydney, Dart had joined the Australian Imperial Forces. He arrived in Europe too late to be involved in active warfare, but his medical skills were in demand as the influenza epidemic began to take hold among the soldiers. As his period of military service neared its end, Dart was offered the position of demonstrator in Smith's Department of Anatomy through the influence of James Wilson, his old professor from Sydney. Although it was rarely given, Dart requested and received permission from the Australian army for demobilisation without returning to Australia and in October 1919 he joined Smith at University College (Wheelhouse and Smithford 2001, 40).

Under Smith's guidance, Dart was introduced to a range of new research topics, including neuroanatomy and anthropology. Smith also recommended Dart, along with another young Australian anatomist, Joseph Shellshear, for the new Rockefeller Fellowship in the United States. The two spent six months teaching anatomy in American departments, three months visiting other schools and three months at the Woods Hole Research Institute in Massachusetts. The trip was a wild success and Dart was especially impressed with Robert J. Terry's collection of skeletons at Washington University in St. Louis (Tobias 1984, 7). Upon their return in late 1921, Shellshear took up the chair of anatomy in Hong Kong, but Dart continued in Smith's laboratory in London.

Although he had yet to make a firm decision about his future, Dart was enjoying the research in London, especially working on the neuroanatomical material that was Smith's speciality. He assumed that he would stay on in London and he could hardly have been more disappointed when Smith proposed that he take up the post at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Dart feared that in faraway South Africa he would be too far from the centre of scientific research that England represented (Dart and Craig 1959, 31). London was the venue for the English meetings of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, the Zoological Society of London and the Royal Society of London and this is where he could network with the finest minds in anatomical science.