Taung
Right from the start of his career, the Universe seemed to
have been nudging Raymond Arthur Dart towards a study of the
anatomy of the human brain. That’s the way you might
look at it, anyway, if you were inclined to new-age thinking.
The nudging got under way in 1914 when Dart, a twenty-year-old
medical student in Australia, attended a public lecture entitled
“The Evolution of the Brain.” The speaker was
Grafton Elliot Smith who was, by now, one of the world’s
leading authorities on the comparative anatomy of the brain.
“I fell under his spell that night,” Dart wrote
later, “and prayed that at some time I would be allowed
to work under him.”
While he was finishing his medical training in Sydney during
the First World War, Dart was appointed as an assistant to
James T. Wilson, a professor in anatomy who also had a special
interest the development of the brain. “Like Darwin,”
Dart tells us, “Wilson was fascinated by vestigial structures
and the light they threw on the grand evolutionary story of
the brain.” From 1915 to his graduation in 1917, Dart
enjoyed a “treasured and intimate” relationship
with Wilson. “His influence on me was so great,”
Dart wrote at the age of sixty-five, “that even today
I often find myself guided by the standards which he implanted
in my young mind.”
Toward the end of the First World War, Dart served as an
Army doctor in France. Then, through his connection with Wilson
back in Australia, he managed to land a job in England, working
for Grafton Elliot Smith himself.
Working under Elliot Smith was my
student dream come true. Not only was he a genius in his own
field but one of the most pleasant human beings I have ever
worked for or with. Tall, ruddy-complexioned and distinguished,
with immaculate white hair, he was the complete antithesis
of the woolly-minded, innocent genius of fiction. Elliot Smith
was with all his brilliance, in every sense, a man of the
world, a great raconteur and popular with his colleagues and
assistants who could usually rely on him to attend and enliven
their daily tea parties.
While Dart was working for him, Elliot Smith appointed Nikolai
Kulchitsky, a former Minister of Education under the Czar,
as a laboratory assistant in an emergency measure to help
the latter keep body and soul together. Having this 64-year-old
refugee from the Bolshevik revolution working for him in such
a humble capacity could have been an awkward situation for
Dart – Kulchitsky was a world-famous authority on the
histology or microscopic structure of the nervous system.
The interaction between the two men turned out, however, to
be pleasant – and fruitful for Dart. Kulchitsky, as ignorant
of English as Dart was of Russian, used bits of French and
German to make an important contribution toward the latter’s
knowledge of the histology of the brain and the rest of the
nervous system.
The year 1922 saw Elliot Smith working on the reconstruction
of the Piltdown “find.” The fact that his chief’s
attention was now focused on anthropology gave fresh impetus
to Dart’s enthusiasm for comparative brain anatomy,
and he spent all his free time working his way through the
comparative collections in the museum of the Royal College
of Surgeons (of which Arthur Keith was, as we’ve seen,
the conservator). That collection included “endocranial
casts” (also called “endocasts” or “brain
casts”) of humans and of apes. Dart himself had learned
to make brain casts as part of the work he was doing for Elliot
Smith – it’s done by pouring a liquid, usually latex,
into an empty skull, and then removing it when it has solidified
into a mass which accurately reflects the shape of the skull’s
original contents.
In the next year, 1923, the 29-year-old Dart left England
with his American wife Dora, to take up a professorship in
anatomy at the newly-created University of the Witwatersrand
in the mining town of Johannesburg in South Africa. Dart was
not going off to this distant outpost of the Empire willingly.
Elliot Smith, had, in fact, pushed him out of the nest – in
addition to recommending him for the South African job, it
seems that he’d put Dart on notice that his English
job would no longer be available. South Africa was, at first,
a terrible disappointment. The medical school’s buildings
were dreary and inadequate, and equipment was basic or non-existent.
Incredibly, there wasn’t even a “general”
library at the university, let alone a medical or anatomical
one.
Dart made the best of things. He created an embryonic library,
and, thinking, perhaps, of the wonderful museum of the Royal
College of Surgeons in which he’d spent so much of his
free time, he offered five pounds – a sum equal to several
hundred present-day U.S. dollars – to the student who
found the most interesting fossil during each annual vacation.
One of his students, Josephine Salmonds, told him about a
fossil skull she’d seen at a family friend’s house.
It had been blasted out of the Buxton lime-mine about two
hundred miles west of Johannesburg near a place called Taung.
(Pronounced ta-OONG, the name means “place of the lion”
in Setswana.) Salmonds thought the skull might be that of
a baboon. Not wanting to dampen her enthusiasm, Dart told
her as gently as he could that she was probably wrong. “Other
than Rhodesian Man and Boskop Man,” he explained, “no
single fossil of any of the primates... has ever been reported
south of the Fayum deposit in Egypt.” But it was Dart
who was wrong. Hans Reck had found baboon fossils at Olduvai
Gorge just before the First World War, and baboon fossils
had already been reported from South Africa itself. Like many
scientists of that time, Dart still shared the prevailing
view that the “primitive” or “backward”
continent of Africa could not have been the ancestral home
of the most advanced of the mammalian orders, the primates.
(The “Rhodesian man” that Dart mentioned to his
student was considered to have been a relative newcomer to
Africa, one whose ancestors had wandered down from Europe
near the tail-end of the Neanderthal period some forty thousand
years ago.)
* * *
The skull that Salmonds brought to the university the next
day, was, at any rate, that of a baboon. Apparently
Africa wasn’t as devoid of primate fossils as Dart had
assumed it to be. “Within minutes,” Dart tells
us, “I was careering down the hill in my Model-T Ford
to discuss the skull and Taung with a friend and colleague,
Dr. R. B. Young, a veteran Scottish geologist.” Young
was, at the time, doing some work for the owners of the Buxton
mine. At Dart’s request, he spoke to the manager about
preserving fossils found during mining operations. That, Young
was told, was already being done. One of the miners, a Mr.
de Bruyn, was an amateur fossil-collector, and he’d
just brought several fossils and fossil-containing fragments
of limestone to the manager’s office. These, the manager
promised, would be packed up and sent to Dart.
The fossils arrived at Dart’s house in two boxes just
as he and his wife were making final preparations for the
wedding, at their home, of a close friend. As Dart told the
story years later, his wife and the groom became anxious when
he tore off the formal collar he’d affixed for his role
as best man, and started opening the boxes. However high Dart’s
expectations of the Taung fossils may have been, they were
exceeded by what he found in the second box.
Lying on top of the rubble was something he’d become
familiar with in England – an endocranial cast. This particular
one was a “natural endocast,” i.e. one that had
not been created by a human anatomist, but by the natural
seepage of a cement-like mixture of lime and sand into a skull.
The skull in question had (Dart realized) been that of a primate.
That primate had, moreover, been an extraordinary one. Its
brain had been fully three times the size a baboon’s
brain. The brain was, in fact, somewhat bigger than a chimpanzee
brain, and a bit smaller than that of a gorilla – about
a third of the human size. The brain-cast Dart was examining
was, therefore, at least that of an ape (rather than a monkey
or a baboon), and was, as such, already a very significant
find.
But that cast didn’t just represent the brain
of an ape – not an ape, at any rate, of the gorilla-chimpanzee-orangutan
kind. In his Adventures with the Missing Link, which
he was to publish more than thirty years later, Dart tells
us that he realized right away, in the few minutes he was
stealing from the wedding preparations, that it had been formed
in the skull of a creature that was more “human-like”
than the living apes. To understand how he could have come
to that conclusion – and come to it so quickly – we
have to get an idea of how informative endocranial casts can
be. The inside of a mammal’s skull isn’t smooth
like, say, the inside of a porridge bowl. It’s a porridge
bowl, instead, whose inside surface has taken on the shape
of the lumps in the porridge it contained. Plainly visible,
therefore, on the endocast Dart was looking at, was a “startling
image of the convolutions and furrows of the brain and the
blood vessels of the skull.”
Among the furrows which run across the sides of the brains
of apes, is one called the “parallel sulcus.”
Not far behind it, is the so-called the “lunate sulcus.”
(“Sulcus” is Latin for “ditch.”) In
humans these two “sulci” are much further removed
from each other. Expansion of the temporal and parietal lobes
of our brains has pushed the lunate sulcus well to the rear
of the position it occupies in apes, and downward to some
extent. In the process of doing this, the parietal cortex
has almost buried the lunate sulcus. Dart’s old chief,
Elliot Smith, had, in fact, been the first person to establish
the existence of the lunate sulcus in the human brain. It
was Elliot Smith’s investigations which had shown that,
in the rare cases where the lunate sulcus does show
up on the surface of the human brain, it will be seen well
to the rear of the parallel sulcus.
Dart was able to satisfy himself at first glance that the
lunate and parallel sulci on the Taung endocast were, in his
words, “separated by a distance three times as great
as in any existing endocast of a living ape’s skull,
whether chimpanzee or gorilla.”
After “ransacking feverishly” through the boxes,
Dart found a large rock with a hole in it which fit the endocast
perfectly. A bit of skull and lower jaw were faintly visible
in the rock, and Dart felt confident that it contained at
least part of the skull or face that went with the endocast.
That face would only emerge weeks later after much patient
chipping and scratching, but Dart had already satisfied himself
on the basis of brain anatomy that he’d found the fossil
of a human-like ape. The phrase “human-like ape”
can, however, be misleading in this context. Chimps, gorillas,
orangs, gibbons and siamangs are already classified as “anthropoid,”
i.e. “human-like” apes. What Dart had recognized
was something more human-like than the so-called
“anthropoid” apes – he had identified a hominid.
In the eighty years which have elapsed since the arrival
of the Taung skull at Dart’s house in 1924, there’s
been controversy about exactly which of the “dimples”
on its surface represents the lunate sulcus. In a well-known
debate with her fellow-anthropologist, Ralph Holloway of Columbia
University, Dean Falk of Albany University has argued that
Taung’s lunate lies well forward of the position identified
with Dart, in the pongid or ape-like position. As I complete
this account in 2006, Falk’s contention hasn’t
been either proved or disproved.
There has, however, been ample proof of the fact that Dart
was right about the human-like characteristics of the Taung
endocast. The fact that it possessed those characteristics
was, moreover, an obvious one for Dart. “I
knew at a glance,” he wrote later, “that what
lay in my hands was no ordinary anthropoidal [i.e. ape-like]
brain.” He seems to have relied as much on the general
shape of the brain as he did on what he saw as the rearward
displacement of the lunate sulcus. It was, he wrote, “a
big, bulging brain and, most importantly, the forebrain was
so big and had grown so far backward, that it completely covered
the hindbrain.”
When a contemporary anatomist uses the term “forebrain”
he or she is usually talking about the entire cerebrum, as
well as the thalamus, the hypothalamus, and the limbic system.
When Dart tells us, however, that the “forebrain”
of the Taung species had expanded and grown backward, he’s
talking only about the anterior lobes of the cerebral cortex.
In both apes and humans (as well as the other mammals), the
cerebral cortex has four lobes in each hemisphere of the brain:
the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital. In humans,
the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes have expanded to
crowd the occipital lobe into a smaller area at the back of
the brain. This is why the lunate sulcus, situated near the
front of the occipital lobe, has been pushed so far to the
rear in our species.
The position of its lunate sulcus was not the only element
of the Taung skull that tipped Dart off to its hominid character.
The Taung endocast was also laterally compressed – the
skull which enclosed it must, in other words, have had been
a fairly narrow one. While ape skulls have a relatively
low dome that gives them a bun-like shape (viewed from the
front or the back), human skulls viewed from those positions
have steep, almost vertical sides which gives them a “loaf
of bread” shape.
Dart seems to have been reacting to several cues when he
realized “at a glance,” that the Taung endocast
had human-like features. Some of them may have been difficult
to put into words. Recognition of patterns and shapes takes
place, after all, in the right side of our brains, on the
opposite side of the centers which process verbal logic. “After
considerable experience,” Charles Darwin admitted in
his treatise on barnacles, “when numerous varieties
of a species have been carefully examined, the eye acquires
a sort of instinctive knowledge, by which it can recognize
the species, though the character cannot be defined by language.”
By 1924, Dart had, as we’ve seen, presumably examined
enough primate brain casts acquire that kind of “instinctive
knowledge.”
Then there’s the matter of the foramen magnum – the
opening through which the spinal cord enters the skull. In
apes that opening is situated toward the back of the cranium,
reflecting the fact that the backbones of animals who walk
on four limbs enter their skulls toward the rear. In humans,
who walk upright, the backbone enters the skull from the bottom.
Although the portion of the skull that had covered the Taung
child’s brain cast was almost entirely missing – destroyed,
probably, in the blast that had detached the skull from the
limestone which had contained it – one piece of it remained.
A fragment of one of the four bones that are fused together
to form the foramen magnum, the right exoccipital, was still
attached to the bottom of the endocast like a scrap of postage
stamp stuck to a parcel wrapping.
This enabled Dart to make a firm determination that the Taung
being’s foramen magnum was situated forward of the typical
ape position. That was obviously a very important indicator
that the species he’d identified had walked upright,
but for Dart it only confirmed what his first sight of the
brain cast had already told him. “I was convinced,”
he wrote, “from the earliest period of my investigations
that these creatures had placed great reliance on their feet
for walking and running and that, consequently, their hands
must have been freed for other tasks. This was implicit
in the globular form of the skull which was obviously balanced
on a more vertically placed type of backbone than that of
a gorilla or chimpanzee.” (The italics are mine.)
We’re thrown back, therefore, on the shape or “look”
of the Taung endocast. That shape hadn’t only convinced
Dart that the Taung species was a human-like primate – it
had also suggested to him that it had walked upright on two
legs.
Without an understanding of Dart’s exceptional exposure
to comparative brain anatomy, one might well be skeptical – as
his long-standing opponent Lord Solly Zuckerman was – of
the “the fossil ape-like skull which, presumably by
divine guidance, Dart immediately recognized as the missing
link.” Dart’s old chief Grafton Elliot Smith had
a better understanding of the level of experience and training
Dart brought to bear on the Taung skull. “It was,”
Elliot Smith declared, “a happy circumstance that such
a specimen fell into ... [Dart’s]... hands, because
he is one of, at the most, three or four men in the world
who have the experience of investigating such material and
appreciating its real meaning.”
In the weeks to come, Dart would laboriously free the Taung
primate’s facial bones from their limestone casing.
This would reveal it to be a child whose permanent teeth were
just starting to erupt. It would also allow the human-like
nature of the child to be established on criteria that were
easier to demonstrate objectively: an upwardly-rising forehead;
a lack of ape-like brow ridges; a jaw that didn’t protrude
as far forward as those of apes, relatively broad cheek-teeth
whose cusps were lower than those of apes, and canines and
incisors which were smaller than those of apes. All this sounds
settled and obvious today, after the discovery of numerous
“post-cranial” or “below the skull”
bones of “australopithecine” hominids has confirmed
Dart’s conclusions. From the perspective of 1925, however,
Dart’s announcement that the Taung primate had been
a human-like, upright-walking being, took extraordinary levels
of both expertise and courage.
Anxious about the imminent arrival of the bridal party at
their house, Dora Dart tried twice to call her husband away
from the boxes of fossils that had been sent from Taung. Dart’s
mind was, however, too occupied with the implications of what
he was seeing to hear her. He was trying to absorb the fact
that he may just have identified “one of the most significant
finds made in the history of anthropology.”
Darwin’s largely discredited theory
that man’s early progenitors probably lived in Africa
came back to me. Was I to be the instrument by which his
‘missing link’ was to be found?
These pleasant daydreams were interrupted
by the bridegroom himself tugging at my sleeve.
“My God, Ray,” he said, striving
to keep the nervous urgency out of his voice. “You’ve
got to finish dressing immediately – or I’ll have
to find another best man.”
* * *
The Taung skull reached Dart toward the end of November of
1924. In about forty days he’d freed the face from its
limestone cover, had photographs taken, and published a description
of the find in the February 7, 1925 issue of Nature.
Dart was cautious. He didn’t claim that the Taung child
was a member of the human family, but placed it, instead,
in a half-ape, half-human family reminiscent of Dubois’
“Pithecanthropoidae,” for which Dart used the
name “Homo-simiadae.”
Nature’s editor elicited responses to Dart’s
report from four of Britain’s leading physical anthropologists
and published them in the next edition of the journal which
appeared on February 14. Not one of those responses supported
Dart’s contention that the Taung infant was a human-like,
upright-walking being. The consensus was, rather, that it
belonged, as Arthur Keith put it, “in the same group
or sub-family as the chimpanzee or gorilla.” Even Elliot
Smith – who would later be won over by his protegé’s
arguments – cautioned that its seemingly human-like features
were “not unknown in the young of the giant anthropoids
and even the adult gibbon.”
Arthur Smith Woodward – who had, in the previous year,
become “Sir Arthur” – directed all the skepticism
that he should have used on “Piltdown man” at
Dart’s find. He was unimpressed by the human-like narrowness
of the Taung endocast: “...the Taungs [sic] skull lacks
a brain-case, so the amount and direction of distortion of
the specimen cannot be determined.” “It is,”
he concluded, “premature to express any opinion as to
whether the direct ancestors of man are to be sought in Asia
or Africa. The new fossil from Africa certainly has little
bearing on the question.” Woodward expressed regret,
too, that Dart had “...chosen so barbarous a (Latin-Greek)
name for it as Australopithecus.”
The full name which Dart had given to the Taung species was
Australopithecus africanus. The “australo”
part of the generic name was Latin for “southern,”
while “pithecus” was Greek for “ape.”
In our time, when a (presumably treacherous) beetle can be
called Utu brutus, it’s hard to understand
how a scientific name could be disapproved on the grounds
that it combined Latin with Greek. Woodward was, however,
not the only one to get huffy about it. “It is generally
felt,” an anonymous commentator in Nature wrote,
“that the name Australopithecus is an unpleasing
hybrid as well as etymologically incorrect.” “If
you want to join in a game,” a British Museum scientist
named F. A. Bather lectured Dart in Nature, “you
have to know the rules.”
Undaunted by the less-than-enthusiastic British reaction
to his find, Dart had plaster casts of the Taung skull made,
painted to resemble the original. These were displayed in
the South African pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition
at Wembley in the summer of 1925. On a chart accompanying
them, Dart suggested that his Australopithecus was
the ancestor of Dubois’ Pithecanthropus. The
exhibit was set out under a banner which read AFRICA: THE
CRADLE OF HUMANITY. That phrase has the easy familiarity of
a cliché today, but it was a shocking one in 1925.
It was a serious challenge, too, to the men who had built
their careers and reputations on the proposition that the
earliest-known ancestor of Homo sapiens had been
found at Piltdown in England.
Keith – who’d also become “Sir Arthur”
since the “discovery” of Eoanthropus – reacted
to the Wembley exhibit by announcing that Dart’s claims
were “preposterous.” Keith was the Pasha now – the
Nabob of the anthropological community. At least within the
British Empire, a word from him could make or break a young
scientist’s reputation. When the British Association
for the Advancement of Science met at Leeds under his chairmanship
in 1927, Keith pointedly omitted any reference to the Taung
skull, emphasizing, instead, the importance of Piltdown man
and that of Dubois’ Pithecanthropus.
Keith was not so reluctant, however, to discuss Taung in
print. Working from casts, he analyzed Dart’s find at
great length in his 1931 New Discoveries Relating to the
Antiquity of Man, coming to the unsurprising conclusion
that it could not represent a human ancestor. A short while
later, the Royal Society (of which Keith was now an influential
member) refused to publish a 300-page monograph written by
Dart on the Taung child – ironically because Keith had
already dealt with the topic adequately in his New Discoveries.
This was like refusing a defense attorney the right to speak,
on the grounds that the prosecutor had already explained the
situation to the jury clearly enough. Dart’s monograph
remained unpublished, and remains so to this day.
* * *
Although Dart was able to divert his attention back to his
teaching duties, and continue to help building up the medical
school in Johannesburg, the disparagement of his scientific
competence by the leaders of his profession put him under
tremendous pressure. That pressure may have contributed to
the breakup of his marriage in 1933. It may also have had
something to do with the fact that he suffered two episodes
which have been described as “breakdowns” in the
long interval between the rejection of his view of the Taung
skull in the mid-1920s, and the final vindication of that
view in the mid-1940s.
The first tangible element of that vindication came along
in 1936 when Dart’s indefatigable Scottish-South African
champion Robert Broom discovered a second australopithecine – an
adult specimen this time – in a karst cave just north
of Johannesburg called Sterkfontein. American interest in
the South African discoveries grew, and then, in the early
forties, ripened into full agreement with Dart’s views.
In 1947, Keith himself – now 81 years old – admitted
on the pages of Nature that Australopithecus
was on, or very close to, the line of human ancestry. “I
am now convinced on the evidence submitted by Dr. Robert Broome,”
he wrote, “that Professor Dart was right and I was wrong.”
That admission might have seemed like a magnanimous one, but
Keith was, in fact, backing away from Piltdown at the last
possible moment. By 1949 Kenneth Oakley was to prove, by measuring
the fluorine content of their organic specimens, that the
Piltdown materials were much younger than they’d been
assumed to have been. In 1953 Joseph Weiner, Oakley, and Le
Gros Clark were to show that the apparent association of those
materials, and their presentation to the scientific community
as a series of genuine finds, were aspects of the elaborate
and carefully-planned fraud we talked about in the previous
chapter.
* * *
How human was Australopithecus africanus? Would
individuals belonging that species have been able, for instance,
to talk to one another?
Dart had decided, as we’ve seen, that the region of
Australopithecus’ cerebral cortex that was
situated between, and adjacent to, the parallel and lunar
sulci – the so-called parieto-temporal complex – was,
compared to the same region in apes, significantly enlarged.
Combining this insight with what he knew about the sensations,
abilities and functions mediated by that region in Homo
sapiens, Dart felt that he could hazard some guesses
about the mental abilities of the human-like little creatures
he’d discovered:
They possessed to a degree unappreciated
by the living anthropoids the use of their hands and ears
and the consequent faculty of associating with the colour,
form and general appearance of objects, their weight, texture,
resilience and flexibility, as well as the significance of
sounds emitted by them. In other words, their eyes saw, their
ears heard, and their hands handled objects with greater meaning
and to fuller purpose than the corresponding organs in recent
apes. They had laid down the foundations of that discriminate
knowledge of the appearance, feeling and sound of things that
was a necessary milestone in the acquisition of articulate
speech.
Until recently, few anthropologists were receptive to the
idea that the australopithecines could have “laid down
the foundations” of linguistic communication. Many would
have agreed, instead, with a frequently-quoted 1982 statement
by the archeologist Randall White, that there was, before
a hundred thousand years ago, “...a total absence of
anything that modern humans would recognize as language.”
As we’ll see in the next few chapters, however, the
idea that the linguistic abilities of our species evolved
over millions, rather than thousands, of years no longer seems
like an unlikely one in the 21st Century.
Dart was also convinced that Australopithecus could
hunt animals larger than itself, an issue which we’ll
discuss at length in the next three chapters. He concluded,
in addition – on the basis of seemingly burned bones found
at Makapansgat – that at least one of the australophithecine
species could control fire.
The last of these conclusions was clearly wrong – no
corroborating evidence of australophithecine fire-use has
ever come to light, and it was later proved that bones on
which that conclusion rested had been blackened by oxides
of manganese and iron rather than by fire.
* * *
I haven’t tried to hide my admiration for the mixture
of intuition, courage and hard intellect which Dart needed
to establish and announce the fact that the Taung child represented
an upright-walking being endowed with some of the physical
and psychological attributes of our species. We must now look,
however, at an area in which Dart’s intellectual daring
pushed him too far. That area concerns the tools or weapons
which Australopithecus might (or might not) have
used to kill and/or butcher other animals.
The sites where the South African australopithecines were
found have, not surprisingly, an enormous quantity of non-hominid
bones. Dart analyzed tens of thousands of those remains from
Makapansgat, and came to the conclusion that australopithecines
had used them, in both modified and unmodified form, to kill
and/or cut up other animals. In bringing the bones to the
cave, the australopithecenes had, Dart believed, selected
those which were useable as tools or weapons. This would explain,
he argued, why gazelle horn-cores and the mandibles or lower
jaw-bones of both antelopes and carnivores were so common
in the Makapansgat assemblage. The former were used, as Dart
saw it, as daggers, while the latter served – with their
teeth in place – as cutters. It would explain, too, why
antelope arm-bones or humeruses were so common in the cave,
and, indeed, why the distal or “lower” ends of
those humeruses were ten times as common as their proximal
ends: because the distal ends were hard, Dart reasoned, they
made better club-heads than the soft “cancellated”
bone of proximal ends. The proximal ends had presumably been
removed, therefore, and discarded outside the cave.
Moving beyond the speculative into the fanciful, Dart suggested
that the absence of tails in Makapansgat cave “was probably
due to their use as signals and whips in hunting outside the
cavern.” Dart, who had a predilection for what his successor
Phillip Tobias called “gargantuan, sesquipdelian, Brobdignagian”
words, named this presumed bone, tooth and horn-using activity
an “Osteodontokeratic Culture.” (Osteo = bone;
donto = tooth; keratic = horn.)
Dart didn’t just see the australopithecines as hunters – he
thought that they were, in addition, cannibals: “Australopithecus
lived,” he wrote, “a grim life. He ruthlessly
killed fellow australopithecines and fed upon them as he would
upon any other beast, young or old.” This conclusion
was based on the fact there were fractures in some of the
Australophithecine skulls and jaws found in South Africa in
the first half of the twentieth century. Dart was, as we’ll
see, simply too eager to see those fractures as evidence that
the owners of the bones in question had been clubbed to death
by their fellows. (The scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey
in which a human-like ape beats another to death with a long
bone is pure Dart.)
Because of this supposed proclivity for cannibalism on the
part of Australopithecus – and because of the fact that
it was thought to have killed and eaten other animals – Dart
regarded it, and its presumed descendant Homo sapiens,
as uniquely cruel beings.
The loathsome cruelty of mankind
to man is the inescapable product of his blood-lust; this
differentiative human characteristic is explicable only in
terms of man’s carnivorous and cannibalistic origin.
Charles Darwin had acknowledged that humans could be cruel,
but he’d laid much of the blame for that on superstition.
The fact that we no longer sacrifice humans to bloodthirsty
gods, or subject them to trial by ordeal shows, Darwin thought,
“what an infinite debt of gratitude we owe to the improvement
of our reason, to science, and to our accumulated knowledge.”
Perhaps because Dart had been exposed, as an army doctor,
to some of the grim effects of the First World War, he was
less optimistic about science and human reason. “Darwin
could not guess,” Dart wrote, (commenting on this “debt
of gratitude” passage in 1959) “that within a
century science would give birth to poison gases, wholesale
human slaughter and atomic obliteration.” The reason
why Darwin didn’t (in Dart’s opinion) realize
how deeply cruelty and aggression were rooted in human nature,
was that Darwin failed (as Dart saw it) to deduce “that
man had inherited those qualities from his predacious ancestry.”
As the Cold War climaxed in the Cuban missile crisis of 1961,
the American playwright Robert Ardrey popularized Dart’s
ideas in a book entitled African Genesis. Like Anna
Karenina and A Tale of Two Cities, Ardrey’s
book starts with the kind of passage that sticks in peoples’
memories:
Not in innocence, and not in Asia,
was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African
highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the
Nile. Here we came about – slowly, ever so slowly, – on
a sky-swept savanna glowing with menace.
The idea that humans were uniquely aggressive and cruel made
sense to a reading public which was facing a real possibility
of nuclear war. Ardrey told his readers that humans are descended
from apes who were “armed killers.” Their endless
competition to develop superior weapons is, he concluded,
“a genetic necessity.” This view of our species
persisted, in some quarters, to the end of the twentieth Century.
“Our first hominid ancestors,” Colin Tudge wrote
in his 1996 Time Before History, “succeeded,
probably, by being at times extremely unpleasant – to
a degree which, among animals only modern chimpanzees achieve.”
Are we really to believe that chimps and humans are uniquely
“unpleasant” because they commit “murders”
and take part in “wars”? A great many other species,
vertebrate and invertebrate, become involved in acts of interpersonal
and intergroup aggression that result in violent death. Looking
back on this Dart-Ardrey view of human nature from the year
2006, I have to confess that I can’t see why any
organism should be regarded as uniquely aggressive and cruel
because it kills members of its own or other species.
In support of his idea that predation by hominids had led
to the development of an extraordinary, aberrant level of
aggression, Dart also pointed out that humans have “either
decimated and eradicated the earth’s animals, or led
them as domesticated pets to his slaughter houses.”
Even this seemingly telling point – that humans have exterminated
other species on a large scale – does not, however, compel
us to accept Dart’s view of human nature. As I’ll
argue in the remaining chapters in this Part, the damage humans
are doing to the biosphere is the result of the unprecedented
power of our species rather than abnormal levels of cruelty
and aggression.
* * *
So much – for the time being anyway – about the psychological,
ecological and ethical conclusions Dart drew from his osteodontokeratic
or “ODK” theory. How has the ODK theory itself
fared in the half-century or so since Dart formulated it?
The short answer is “not well.” In 1965 C. K.
“Bob” Brain, then a newly-appointed paleontologist
at the Transvaal Museum, started analyzing the fossils in
Swartkrans Cave. Increasing acquaintance with this and other
bone assemblages brought Brain to the realization that the
skeletal disproportion in Makapansgat that had been caused,
as Dart saw it, by hominid selection, was the result, instead,
of the simple fact that some kinds of bone survive destructive
processes better than other kinds. Some years previously Brain
had already found, in a sample of modern goat bones discarded
by Nama herders and then chewed on by their dogs, that 87
distal humerus pieces had survived but not a single proximal
end. The answer lay in the fact that the hard bone on the
distal ends had survived the chewing, trampling and weathering
they had been subjected to, while the fragile, spongy proximal
ends were easily destroyed for the nutrients they contained.
When Brain told Dart that the overall survival of the goat
skeletal parts he’d collected in Namibia closely mirrored
the survival proportions of the Makapansgat material, Dart
was at first, Brain relates, “taken aback and perplexed.”
But after this initial dismay, he
became increasingly enthusiastic, saying “this is wonderful – now
at last we are getting closer to the truth.” Rather
than condemning this young upstart who was upsetting his cherished
concept, Dart nominated me for an award. I realized then that
he was much more interested in the subject of his investigations
than in his position relative to them and that he was one
of those rare individuals with true generosity of spirit,
particularly in this rather emotional field of paleoanthropology.
In his 1981 Hunters or the Hunted? – An Introduction
to African Cave Taphonomy, and other publications, Brain
demonstrated convincingly that most of the bones at Makapansgat
and several other South African caves of the same kind, in
which early hominid remains had been found, were were accumulated
by non-hominid agencies such as water, gravity, non-human
predators, and that those bones had, in many cases, been modified
by non-hominid carnivores and by porcupines. The fractures
of australopithecine crania which Dart had regarded as evidence
of blows delivered by antelope leg-bone clubs, were, Brain
showed, more likely to have been caused by the bites of non-hominid
predators such leopards.
This critique led to a total rejection by the paleoanthropological
community of Dart’s notion that the australopithecines
were hunters and tool-users. Proof has now emerged, however,
as we’ll see in the next two chapters, that at least
one of the australopithecine species whose existence overlapped
with that of africanus used stone tools to butcher
medium-sized mammals. As I’ll try to explain, too, in
those chapters, the circumstances of that butchery has persuaded
some archeologists that those little tool-users must have
obtained the carcasses in question by hunting, or by aggressive
scavenging. Dart’s ODK theory has itself turned out
to contain a grain of truth: by the mid-1980s Bob Brain had
identified wear-marks on the ends of about sixty bone specimens
from Swartkrans’s three older Members, (consisting mainly
of the long bones and the horn-cores of of antelopes, but
including, too, the left lower jaw-bone of a three-toed horse)
which demonstrate clearly that those bones had been used as
digging implements.
Brain showed a selection of these implements to Dart, who
was by this time close to 90 and almost blind. “Brain,”
the latter replied, after feeling their shape with his fingers,
“I told you a long time ago that Australopithecus
made bone tools, but you didn’t believe me. Now, what
do you suppose these were used for?”
Brain replied that they were almost certainly used for digging
in the ground.
“That,” Dart replied, “is the most unromantic
suggestion that I have heard in my life.” Despite the
fact that he was well-disposed toward Brain’s work,
the old man clearly hadn’t let go of the melodramatic
aspects of his ODK theory. Picking up one of the sharpest
bone tools on the table he stuck it into Brain’s ribs.
“I could run you through with this,” he said.
Drama and exaggeration had long been elements of Dart’s
style, and nobody was going to change that. An earlier suggestion,
made privately to him by his successor in the chair of anatomy
at University of the Witwatersrand, Phillip Tobias, that his
tendency to overstate his arguments was putting people off,
was dismissed in good humor:
He looked at me, not unkindly, but bridling
a bit, and said, “Phillip, I have to do it this way,
with such a new and revolutionary concept.” He warmed
a little: “If you don’t give the [expletive]
200 per cent, they [expletive]-well won’t believe
the half of it.” The frown gave way to a sudden warm
smile and chuckle.
CHAPTER 9–
Scary
monsters can materialize out of the darkness
