SOUTH AFRICAN MAN-APES — DART 327 



triradiate or almost circular holes in skulls indicated thrusts with 

 pointed objects such as the shafts of broken bones or horn tips; tri- 

 angular depressions seemed as though caused by stones or other mis- 

 siles; openings in the skull where the outer table had been wrenched 

 away demonstrated tearing off by finger and thumb or by a levering 

 bone or horn; depressed margins of openings and partially crushed 

 infantile skull boxes exhibited the work of squeezing palms and poking 

 fingers. 



Most important and very puzzling until the explanation came to 

 light were those skulls from all three sites, both baboon and aus- 

 tralopithecine, where the fractures were in the form of a double fur- 

 row with a hillock formed by the broken bone in between the two 

 furrows. Clearly the same sort of tool had been used at all three sites. 

 The only objects in the breccia that fitted into these double depressions 

 were the double epicondylar ridges on the distal ends of the antelope 

 upper arm bones. Then it was seen that very rarely were humeri, or 

 upper arm bones, of any ungulate beast found in the bone deposit, 

 whose epicondylar ridges had not suffered extensive damage prior to 

 fossilization. Patently the thug technique of bashing heads in with 

 any handy bone or brick had a heritage of at least a million years. 



HYENA FANCIES AND FACTS 



Despite these convincing proofs concerning the systematized pre- 

 daceous, carnivorous, and cannibalistic habit of Australopithecinae 

 and these specific evidences of their ability to seize upon the limb bones 

 and horns of wild beasts and to employ them m the chase and inter- 

 necine strife as well as in the procurements of their food, various 

 individuals (Oakley, 1953; Von Koenigswald, 1953) still insisted on 

 resurrecting the notion, put forward in a conjectural fashion by Dean 

 William Buckland (1822) 130-odd years ago, that cavern bone accumu- 

 lations are the work of hyenas. 



This myth of the bone-accumulating hyena has been discussed at 

 length in an article in the American Anthropologist (Dart, in press), 

 so it would be repetitious to deal with all its absurdities here. Buck- 

 land embroidered an Oriental fable to account for deposits of broken 

 bones in caves (that were both contemporaneously and subsequently 

 being shown to be the work of prediluvial man) which he could not 

 attribute to the supposed Universal Deluge. Buckland's fanciful as- 

 sumption was adopted uncritically in that pre-Darwinian era by his 

 most brilliant pupil, Charles Lyell. First published in 1838, Lyell's 

 Students' Elements of Geologj'^ ran through six editions and en- 

 trenched Buckland's bone-accumulating hyena theory in geological 

 and archeological faith, despite the subsequent overthrow of the Mo- 

 saic chronology it was originally invented to support. 



370830— 56 22 



