SOUTH AFRICAN MAN- APES — DART 319 



These important Asiatic discoveries of very early man had been 

 made possible by the great expedition of the American Museum of 

 Natural History into Mongolia and the Gobi Desert and by Rockefeller 

 Foundation funds. The public interest they aroused, along with 

 Darwin's ideas (that when man first lost his hairy covering he prob- 

 ably inhabited a hot country and subsisted on a frugivorous diet) and 

 the finding of fossil ape teeth in the Siwalik hills of India, had the 

 eifect of consolidating the general expectation that any important 

 human ancestors could come only from the tropical or more northern 

 regions of Asia. They could not conceivably come from the other end 

 of the Old World, southern Africa, a temperate region on the fringe of 

 the Kalahari Desert, where there were no tropical forests and no lus- 

 cious groves of fruit-laden trees for man's supposedly frugivorous ape- 

 like progenitors to eat. 



Times have changed in Africa in the 80 years since Darwin wrote. 

 People nowadays rush across the continent from north to south and 

 from east to west in airplanes, trucks, and cars, or on motorcycles and 

 scooters. Every serious tropical scourge has been vanquished. Stag- 

 gered by the stupendous mineral wealth and agricultural potentiality 

 of central Africa, some, like Felice Bellotti (1954, p. 21), claim that 

 "the Congo is the America of tomorrow." Certainly Americans are, 

 and have good reason to be, deeply interested in central Africa. Amer- 

 ica's Negro population came mainly from central Africa; it was an 

 American medical missionary. Dr. Thomas N. Savage, who shipped the 

 first gorilla from the Congo to Boston and enabled an American anato- 

 mist. Dr. Jefi'ries Wyman, of Harvard University, to identify the 

 gorilla as a separate race of manlike apes for the first time in 1847. It 

 was also an American, Carl Akeley, who was instrumental in the fur- 

 ther study of the great apes and in insuring their perpetual protection 

 in the Pare National Albert between Lake Kivu and Lake Edward. 

 Recently, too, it has been chiefly American aid from the Wenner-Gren 

 and Wilkie Foundations that has been enabling us in South Africa to 

 bring to light the australopithecine fossils. They have fulfilled Dar- 

 win's prophecy by connecting man with his apelike progenitors, and 

 have thus closed the gap between living apes and mankind to such an 

 extent that it is no longer apparent. 



FACTS FROM SOUTH AFRICA 



This South African "missing link" story goes back to 1924 when the 

 late Miss Josephine Salmons, then a young science student in anatomy, 

 brought me a fossil baboon skull that she had foimd on the mantel- 

 piece of E. A. Izod, a friend she had visited the previous Sunday 

 evening. It had come from the Northern Lime Company's works at 

 Buxton, near Taungs in Bechuanaland, of which Mr. Izod was a direc- 



