The Stone Ages of South Africa. 27 



ments from the nuclei. The impact would, in many cases, result in 

 the partial cleavage of both boulders, and of this there are manifest 

 and numerous proofs in the Stellenbosch and Drakenstein deposits, 

 where rounded boulders seem to have been exclusively used. The 

 skill evinced in some of the rougher examples, as seen in Figs. 7, 8, 

 12, 15, 21 is, however, of such poor description that I am probably 

 justified in postulating that paring tools other than any fragment or 

 splinter of rock were not required for the purpose. But together 

 with these roughly fabricated artefacts there are found, in situations 

 pointing clearly to the same origin and to the same epoch, bouchers 

 highly finished, although broadly facetted, and fully worked into a 

 point (Figs. 1 to 4, &c., PI. I.). For fashioning a split pebble into an 

 amygdaloidal- or tongue-shaped implement, flaking and paring tools 

 were necessary, and were evidently used ; but so far, in the deposits 

 of the two localities already mentioned (and I consider, for reasons 

 to be given hereafter, that they are among the most ancient in South 

 Africa), no evidence of these instruments has as yet been obtained. 

 Nothing has been found to my knowledge resembling even the tools 

 that might have served this purpose {cf. PL XI., Figs. 86-90), and 

 which are known from other localities where bouchers have been 

 found, as well as from places where they have not been met with. 



All bouchers, however, have not been evolved from rounded 

 boulders ; some are made from fragments detached from large rock 

 masses. To obtain the material required, correspondingly large 

 hammers, which I may term detaching hammers, in the shape 

 of Fig. 75 of PI. XL, were used. Artefacts of this kind are 

 now recorded from the neighbourhood of Cape Town, but I am 

 by no means certain that the epoch when the detaching hammers 

 were in vogue coincides with that of the Stellenbosch and 

 Drakenstein deposits. There are occasionally found nuclei of the 

 same shape as the detaching hammers, but with edges so numerous 

 and sharp that it is plain that they are the residual nuclei or cores 

 from which chips were detached, and not hammers ; were it 

 otherwise the edges w^ould be abraded, which is not the case. 



Quite lately there were discovered at Fishhook, Cape Colony, on 

 the slope of a hill usually covered by a huge sand-dune, which had 

 been temporarily removed by abnormally strong winds, quite a 

 number of these extremely large detaching hammers plainly bearing 

 marks of the use to which they had been put. They were associated 

 with river-boulder palaeoliths of a most ancient type, as well as with 

 others that had been fashioned from non -rolled pebbles, but of equally 

 ancient appearance. On a part of the wholly exposed floor those 



