Australopithecines: the hunters or the hunted?

Abstract

ANY attempt to reconstruct the ecology of the australopithecines must include some guesses as to their locomotion, intelligence, tool using, and diet (Bartholomew and Birdsell 1953). The very human pelvis and small cranial capacity suggest that these plains-living forms were bipeds of a low level of intelligence, but theories as to tool use and diet are much more debatable. Here the evidence is necessarily indirect, depending in large part on the distribution of the bones of the associated fauna and of the australopithecines themselves. Of the hundreds of australopithecine bones which have been discovered, there is not one single whole limb bone (Broom and Schepers 1946; Broom, Robinson and Schepers 1950; Broom 1950; Broom and Robinson 1952). Among the thousands of bones of associated animals, there is a very high frequency of cranial remains. This peculiar frequency of bones has become one of the main arguments that the australopithecines were hunters, and more specifically head hunters and trophy keepers (Dart 1949, 1955, 1956a, 1956b; Hughes 1954). Men were surely hunters from approximately second glacial times, but it is uncertain if the hunting habit was already present in the Lower Pleistocene. The taste for meat is one of the main characteristics distinguishing man from the apes, and this habit changes the whole way of life. Hunting involves cooperation within the group, division of labor, sharing food by adult males, wider interests, a great expansion of territory, and the use of tools. It is therefore important to date the beginning of hunting in order to interpret the origin of human behavior. Did man take to the grasslands because he was a hunter, or did he become carnivorous long after leaving the forests? The answers to these questions may lie in the earliest australopithecine deposits, those at Makapan and Sterkfontein (Oakley 1954; Howell 1954, 1955). These deposits are of Lower Pleistocene age and may be old enough to contain our direct ancestors.