324 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



with or closely akin to A. 'prometheus^ were contemporaneous with, 

 and may have manufactured, the stone pebble artifacts found along- 

 side these few fossil bones. At one stroke the supposed cultural gap 

 between ape and man had also been so narrowed as virtually to 

 vanish. The only alternative to the deduction that these australopithe- 

 cines, whether man or ape, had made the stone artifacts, is to find 

 one day some other and rather more advanced primitive hiunan type 

 in the same stratum, which might then be regarded as responsible for 

 the implements and for destroying the australopithecines. 



This latter, of course, is a possibility ; but, from what we know about 

 the intelligence of living anthropoids on the one side and the structure 

 and habits of A. 'prometheiis on the other side, it seems vastly more 

 probable that protohumanity, at the australopithecine phase of 

 development, had developed all the intelligence necessary for making 

 whatever intellectual leap may have been involved in the cultural feat 

 of utilizing stones as tools and even of shaping them to that end. 



Kohler, Yerkes, and other students of chimpanzee behavior have 

 shown, as Leslie A. White (1932, pp. 69-70) put it, that— 



apes can build according to plans which are formulated to fit the situation of 

 the moment. Thus an ape can build a structure of boxes and, with a tool which 

 he has made by joining two sticks, knock a banana from the roof of his cage. . . . 

 The ape has the capacity to conceive of configurations and then to project 

 them into materials, tools and objectives. He has the capacity to execute a 

 series of acts implicitly before he conimences them overtly. Figuratively speak- 

 ing he rehearses in his mind the series of steps necessary to attain an objective 

 before he makes a move. Then he proceeds to re-arrange his environment accord- 

 ing to his plan. Thus the ape is a sub-lingual architect, or, even a dramatist. 



These extinct australopithecines had brains about twice as big as 

 those of chimpanzees : more important, they were not semierect crea- 

 tures that built nests of broken branches in the tops of trees like 

 chimpanzees, where they chattered and munched shoots of leaves and 

 fruit. Australopithecines greatly exceeded chimpanzees and gorillas 

 in the use of tools because, along with bigger brains, they had hip 

 bones and a pelvis, thighs, legs, and feet that were in no sense apelike. 

 Their trunk and lower limb bones and muscles were just as human as 

 those in the torso and hips, buttocks and thighs, legs, and feet of 

 Pygmies or Bushmen. They did not spend their lives clambering in 

 trees or swinging from branches, nor did they scamper over the rocks 

 on all fours like baboons; they .strode and raced across the veld like 

 men. They did not lollop along supporting a great part of their body 

 weight on their knuckles like chimpanzees and gorillas, when they are 

 on the ground ; they marched on their heels and their arms swung free, 

 and customarily they carried in their hands weapons, just as all 

 human beings have carried them since they became upright. Their 

 weapons were not fashioned of stones — they were crude, unshapen 



