326 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



or a club. The bludgeon blow was so vicious that it had shattered 

 the jaw on both sides of the face and knocked out all the front teeth. 

 That dramatic specimen impelled me in 1948 and the 7 years following 

 to study further their murderous and cannibalistic way of life. 



Twenty years before that — the year after Australopithecus afri- 

 canus had been discovered — it had been shown (Dart, 1926) that the 

 Taungs cavern breccia was a midden heap ; and that its contents con- 

 sisted of comminuted bones of turtles, birds, insectivores, rodents, 

 baboons, and small bucks, as well as bird-egg shells. Later, crabs 

 and rock rabbits were added to the known diet ; and when describing 

 the dentition (Dart, 1934) I pointed out that the baboons, which 

 constituted the best-known dietary objects at Taungs, had been killed 

 by dexterous force. Some skulls showed radiating fractures due to 

 the impact of picks or projectiles, probably stones, in the right 

 parietotemporal region of the skull. Others exhibited rounded 

 openings in the top or at the base, suggesting that the brains had 

 been forcibly removed for food. 



The 58 baboon skulls and jaws that had been found in the interim 

 at Taungs, Sterkfontein, and Makapansgat (Dart, 1949) enabled me 

 later to compare the identical kinds of violence to which they had 

 been subjected at these three different sites removed geogi-aphically 

 from one another by hundreds of miles and separated from one an- 

 other in time by scores and possibly hundreds of thousands of years. 

 Studying each specimen with the assistance of Prof. R. H. Macintosh, 

 head of the Department of Forensic Medicine, and other medical men 

 competent through their professional experience to express an opinion 

 about lethal injuries, it became obvious that these cranial fractures 

 were of too local and specific a character to be explained by rock 

 falls or earth collapses, such as some people might have been led to 

 suggest ; they had been caused by implements of some sort wielded by 

 hands. 



Sixty-four percent of these baboon skull and jaw specimens had 

 been fractured by right-handed blows apparently delivered from the 

 front; 17 percent were unmistakably right-handed because they had 

 smashed in the left side; only 5 percent could be regarded as left- 

 handed ; and 14 percent had apparently been delivered from the rear 

 by stealth and once again with the right hand. Out of six australo- 

 pithecine skulls, four, i. e., two-thirds, had received vertical shocks 

 from in front, while two had succumbed to blows in the left lateral 

 region of the skull, also apparently wielded by the right hand. These 

 diagnoses had been made before the adolescent mandible with its 

 graphic chin blow came into my hands. 



An utterly unexpected outcome of that careful analysis of baboon 

 and australopithecine skull fractures was the further light the frac- 

 tures threw on the technique employed in killing and eating. Small 



