The Minimal Bone‐Breccia Content of Makapansgat and the Australopithecine Predatory Habit

Abstract

D URING his stay in Northern Rhodesia in July 1955, S. L. Washburn (1957), as he reports, spent enough time in Wankie Game Reserve to examine in one area 35 recent kills presumably made lions and feasted upon them and subsequently by numerous other animals such as jackals, hyenas, civets and wild dogs. ... Fourteen of kills were warthogs and only two of their skeletons were in great measure preserved, while seven of sixteen large antelope and zebra skeletons almost wholly remained. Washburn concluded from this brief investigation that the frequency of jaws, skulls, and upper cervical vertebrae in australopithecine deposits is not necessarily evidence for hunting, head hunting or human activities, but may be due to selective eating carnivores. If, when writing his article, Washburn had been able to study my more extensive work (Dart 1957a) on osteodontokeratic culture of Australopithecus prometheus, he would doubtless have appreciated that it was not merely frequency of jaws, skull, and upper cervical vertebrae in Makapansgat deposit but also condition in which these objects were found and known purposes for which they have been employed mankind that supported my contention of head hunting on part of Australopithecus. The numerical comparison that Washburn legitimately draws between state of ungulate and other game skeletons, after Carnivora are finished with them, and australopithecine bone deposits was brought to my attention a decade ago Peter Mihalik, was then Senior Lecturer in Department of Anatomy here. Having at that time recently arrived from Hungary, where he had done much hunting, Mihalik was deeply impressed comparability of osteodontokeratic contents of cave deposit at Makapansgat and remnants of carnivore feasts found in Europe. Carnivores, he said first attack belly; they eat from below upwards. The australopithecine puzzle does not lie in this sort of broad numerical resemblance between bony contents of australopithecine deposits and remnants of carnivore kills which Washburn has corroborated. The principal puzzle is that remnants of carnivore kills are found, as Washburn found them, out in open in immediate vicinity of sites where kills were made, whereas australopithecine bone breccias are found in dolomitic caverns into which they must have been transported. At this point one necessarily asks, who did transporting? I have been bringing forward evidence for over thirty years to show that transporting agents were australopithecines. Many authorities beginning with Gregory (1938) and Broom and Schepers (1946) accepted