322 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



come face to face with the dilemma that Darwin (1871, p. 279) boldly 

 visualized 85 years ago : He realized that when such creatures as the 

 Australopithecinae were found we would not know whether to call 

 them men or apes. He actually wrote on this very matter : "Whether 

 primeval man, when he possessed few a.rts, and those of the rudest kind, 

 and when his power of speech was extremely imperfect, would have 

 deserved to be called man, must depend on the definition we employ. 

 In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature 

 to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite 

 point where the term 'man' ought to be used. But this is a m,atter of 

 very little iTnportaTiceP (Italics are mine.) 



Ever since the discovery of the South African manlike apes, this 

 business of trying to determine the boundary between ape and man or, 

 expressed otherwise, to define what is and what is not a man has become 

 increasingly difficult. It will always remain difficult until we realize 

 with Darwin that this question, lilj:e each of those other more ancient 

 philosophical posers (such as "how many angels can balance on a pin- 

 head" or "which came first, the hen or the egg"), is a matter of little 

 importance. 



AUSTRALOPITHECINE ACHIEVEMENTS AT MAKAPANSGAT 



The thinking power of the australopithecine brain can be assessed to 

 some extent by the form it takes inside the skull, by the differences be- 

 tween its form and that of the chimpanzee and the gorilla ; but it can 

 be gaged by the average person more conveniently through what these 

 manlike apes did. Upon this very matter of what they did and were 

 able to do, investigations in the Makapansgat Valley have been throw- 

 ing much light in the past few years. (See pi. 1, figs. 1 and 2.) 



This remarkable little valley, less than 200 miles north of Johannes- 

 burg, has been riddled for the last million years with limestone caves 

 that have served as the dwellings of primitive mankind from australo- 

 pithecine times right down to the European Voortrekkers and their 

 northward intrusion into the Transvaal from the Cape of Good Hope. 



Barely a mile separates the first from the last of eight known and 

 partially explored caves along this valley; fossil-bone deposits show 

 that all of them were occupied by recent man or his predecessors. One 

 cavern, known as the Limeworks site, was occupied by the manlike apes 

 called Australopithecus prometheus and no less than three other caves 

 by prehistoric men in the various phases of their development from the 

 Old Stone Age onward. 



The most thoroughly excavated human site, known as the "Cave of 

 Hearths," has revealed a virtually unbroken record of habitation from 

 Old Stone Age times down to the present day, of probably 100,000 

 years duration. At the Limeworks site, nearly a mile farther down 



