Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [464]
Susman admitted that “the attribution of individual fossils to Paranthropus is complicated by the presence of a second hominid taxon (Homo c.f. erectus) at Swartkrans.” But he pointed out: “In Member 1, however, more than 95% of the cranio-dental remains are attributed to Paranthropus. This fact suggests that there is an overwhelming probability that any one specimen recovered from Member 1 samples [represents] Paranthropus” (Susman 1988 p. 782). But even Susman (1988, p. 782) admitted that a thumb metacarpal (SK 84) found in Member 1 at Swartkrans in 1949 probably belonged to a Homo individual rather than Paranthropus.
So any matching of hand bones with hominid species at Swartkrans is still uncertain. The only thing that could end this uncertainty would be the discovery of hand bones in undisputed connection with other Paranthropus fossils.
But even if the new hand bones do belong to Paranthropus, there is no guarantee that Paranthropus, rather than Homo, made any of the stone and bone tools found at Swartkrans. “Did the two species live side by side?” asks anthropologist Eric Delson of the City University of New York. “Did [P. ] robustus use leftovers of Homo erectus tool kits? There is no way to test these questions adequately” (Bower 1988, p. 345).
11.3.6 Makapansgat and Final Victory
In 1925, Raymond A. Dart investigated a tunnel at Makapansgat, South Africa. Noting the presence of blackened bones, Dart (1925) concluded hominids had used fire there. In 1945, Philip V. Tobias, then Dart’s graduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand, found the skull of an extinct baboon in the cave deposits of Makapansgat and called it to Dart’s attention. In 1947, Dart himself went back out into the field, after a lapse of two decades, to hunt for Australopithecus bones at Makapansgat.
At Makapansgat, Dart (1948) found australopithecine skull fragments (including an occipital) and other bones, along with more signs of fire. Dart therefore called the creature who lived there Australopithecus prometheus, after the Titan who stole fire from the gods. Today, Australopithecus prometheus is classified, along with the Taung and Sterkfontein specimens, as Australopithecus africanus, distinct from the robust australopithecines of Kromdraai and Swartkrans.
Most of the Makapansgat fossils came from dumps of broken rock in front of the quarry there. From the matrix surrounding the fossils, Dart said he was able to correlate them with identifiable fossil-bearing strata nearby. Had anatomically modern human fossils been recovered in such fashion, any claims for their great age would have been subjected to merciless criticism. This is because the main hominid layers at Makapansgat have been dated at about 3 million years by paleomagnetic methods (K. Weaver 1985, p. 596).
Dart discovered 42 baboon skulls at Makapansgat, 27 of which had smashed fronts. Seven more showed blows on the left front side (Dart 1959, p. 106). Dart, suspecting that australopithecines had been the cause of the damage, requested that R. H. Mackintosh, a specialist in forensic medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand, examine the skulls. Dart and Mackintosh concluded that the skulls showed signs of having been struck by a “powerful downward, forward, and inward blow, delivered from the rear upon the right parietal bone by a double-headed object” (Wendt 1972, p. 224). They believed the weapon was an antelope’s humerus (the bone of the upper forelimb). The joint of an antelope humerus, noted Dart, exactly fit the double impressions on several broken baboon skulls.
From the evidence he gathered at Makapansgat, Dart created a lurid portrait of Australopithecus prometheus as a killer ape-man, bashing in the heads of baboons with primitive bone tools and cooking their flesh over fires in the Makapansgat cave. While his robust cousins had remained in the forest, peacefully