Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [465]
Dart said: “Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers; carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring their writhing flesh” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 40).
Dart and Mackintosh also ascertained that australopithecines were killed in the same way as the baboons (Wendt 1972, pp. 226–227). “Australopithecus lived a grim life,” wrote Dart (1959, p. 191). “He ruthlessly killed fellow australopithecines and fed upon them as he would upon any other beast, young or old.”
Today, however, paleoanthropologists characterize Dart’s portrait of Australopithecus as somewhat exaggerated. Johanson and Edey (1981, p. 65) call the vision of the killer ape-man “something of an embarrassment to anthropologists, who honor Dart for his dazzling recognition of the first australopithecine, but shake their heads over this later aberration.”
In addition to antelope bones, Dart collected at Makapansgat many other animal remains that he believed had been used as daggers, choppers, saws, clubs, and so forth. He grouped these into what he called an “osteodontokeratic” industry, comprising tools made from bones, teeth, and horns (Dart 1957). In 1954, C. K. Brain found pebble tools at Makapansgat, 25 feet above the main layers in which the australopithecine fossils were found. One possible conclusion: a hominid more advanced than Australopithecus was the maker of the tools. But Dart (1959, pp. 159–160) pointed out that Australopithecus skeletal fragments were also to be found in the same layer as the pebble tools.
Dart’s views about Australopithecus hunting activity at Makapansgat aroused heavy opposition. Some scientists said that the combination of Australopithecus fossils, mammalian bones, and broken baboon skulls represented not hominid occupation sites but the lairs of hyenas or leopards.
To this Dart (1959, pp. 120–131) replied that hyenas, in particular, do not tend to leave such accumulations of bones in their lairs. However, C. K. Brain replied with a more sophisticated version of the carnivore hypothesis that eventually won the day. “Over a period of years,” wrote Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (1977, p. 96), “Brain observed that a combination of scavenging habits of local carnivores, and the differential resistance to weathering of various types of bone, produces a bone collection virtually identical to the one Dart found in the cave: the osteodontokeratic culture is apparently no more than the left overs from many leopard and hyena meals!”
Nevertheless, this version does not seem to account for some of the evidence reported by Dart. For example, Dart (1959, p. 166) told of finding a gazelle horn wedged solidly into the core of an antelope femur, clear evidence of an intentional act. Dart also noted that the bones of birds, turtles, and porcupines, not the normal prey of hyenas and leopards, were among those found in the cave.
Concerning the evidence for fire at Makapansgat, some researchers said the black deposits were not ash (Oakley 1954, 1956). Others claimed that although there might be signs of fire, the australopithecines were not the cause of them (Broom 1950, p. 74; Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 69).
But even though Dart’s views were discredited, there was a positive result. According to Herbert Wendt (1972, p. 222), the controversy over the Makapansgat discoveries “brought the australopithecines into the news, and enhanced their status even in the eyes of their original critics.”
Another key event was the publication, in 1946, of a monograph on the australopithecines by Broom and Schepers. The National Academy of Sciences of the United States gave Broom and his coauthor the Daniel Giraud Medal for the most important