SOUTH AFRICAN MAN-APES — DART 323 



the valley, just as at all other known man-ape sites, nothing in the 

 nature of a stone implement had ever been discovered before October 

 1954. That month C. K. Brain was sampling the main sections of the 

 Limeworks deposit for mineralogical analysis when he found a number 

 of stone pebbles that appeared to have been artificially fractured. 

 They lay in an 18-foot gravel stratum 15 feet above the stratum of gray 

 bone-breccia material, from which the australopithecine remains had 

 previously been recovered. The 129 trimmed stones submitted by Mr. 

 Brain to Prof. C. van Riet Lowe for examination included 10 flake 

 artifacts, 4 artifacts on water-worn pebbles, 2 artifacts on thin slabs 

 of dolomite, and 1 split pebble, which he "assigned to the Developed 

 Kafuan Culture as this occurs in Uganda and ... in the 200 ft. ter- 

 race of the Vaal River at Klipdam." 



Even implements of the Old Stone Age are rarely found in cavern 

 deposits. To find in such a site pebble stone tools, that must have pre- 

 ceded Old Stone Age tools by hundreds of thousands of years and had 

 only been found previously in the oldest known Pleistocene river grav- 

 els of Africa, was utterly unprecedented. As Prof, van Riet Lowe 

 (Brain, van Riet Lowe, and Dart, 1955) pointed out, this discovery of 

 Kafuan-type artifacts in a terraced river gravel in an undisturbed stra- 

 tified sequence of deposits immediately overlying australopithecine- 

 bearing breccias in a cave is unique; and as he stated later in a broad- 

 cast talk : "It narrows the gap between ape and man as it has never 

 been narrowed before : it reduces the geological horizons between which 

 missing links are to be sought in a manner that anthropologists could 

 not previously have visualized." 



Yet still more was to come from the Limeworks. The generous finan- 

 cial assistance afforded to Professor van Riet Lowe and to myself by 

 the Wenner-Gren Foundation of New York for our previously sepa- 

 rate programs (his at the Cave of Hearths, mine at the Limeworks) 

 enabled us early in 1955 to make a joint onslaught on the Limeworks 

 pebble stratum. Revil Mason and Alun R. Hughes undertook 

 the fieldwork with the assistance of Dr. Edouard E. L. Bone of the 

 University of Louvain and Mile. Suzanne Jean of the Musee de 

 I'Homme, Paris, during part of the time. 



They recovered several thousand pebbles, and in the material coming 

 from the same gravel stratum, which had previously furnished no 

 fossils and was regarded as sterile, Mr. Mason first discovered various 

 fragments of bone, including the enamel plate of an elephant tooth. 

 Most important of all, on April 30 Mr. Hughes found a small fragment 

 of the right side of the upper jaw of an Australopithecus^. The piece 

 was too small to enable us to determine whether or not it was actually 

 A. prometheus; but if not, it is certainly a very closely related type. 

 Small as the fragment is, it showed that australopithecines, identical 



