328 ANTNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1956 



Realizing the fii'm grip this preposterous theory had secured on 

 geological and anthropological interpretation of bone deposits in 

 caves, we decided in 1948 to sort the whole Limeworks dump system- 

 atically, to retain every fragment of bone isolated from the bone- 

 bearing breccia, and thus to secure a body of material capable of sta- 

 tistical comparison with any samples of bones that might be taken from 

 hyena or other carnivore dens. In this fashion, during the past 10 

 years, first by 3 years of casual sorting and during the subsequent 7 

 years by systematic extraction and development of all the breccia en- 

 countered, 7,159 bone fragments had been isolated up to July 1955. 

 A statistical report was then presented at the Third Pan- African 

 Congress of Prehistory at Livingstone analyzing their distribution. 



Meantime hyena lairs had been examined, first in 1953 on the farm 

 Mala Mala on the western boundary of the Kruger National Park, 

 and then about 800 miles to the west in the Gemsbok National Park 

 in the Southern Kalahari in the vicinity of the river-bed junction 

 of the Auob and Nosob Rivers. Two low rocky recesses in the river 

 banks within the Gemsbok National Park that had been occupied by 

 porcupines yielded, in 1954, to Alun R. Hughes and C. F. Brand 146 

 bones and horns (89 from one and 57 from the other) of which 110 

 bore the marks of porcupine gnawing. The local game warden, J. D. 

 le Riche, born on the farm Twee Rivieren before it was absorbed into 

 the reserve, attributed the scattered bones littering the floors of these 

 2- to 3-foot-high calcrete recesses to the porcupines (many of whose 

 quills corroborated his evidence) , which had obtained them from hyena 

 "kills" in the vicinity. 



A similar symbiosis of hyena and porcupine on the hill Platberg, 

 15 miles north of Klerksdorp in the Transvaal, gave a surface total 

 of 168 bones scattered about on doleritic blocks and the sloping ground 

 below. Hyenas, two of which have been shot on the property in the 

 last two years, have probably played some part in aggregating these 

 bones, because their droppings occur nearby and 27 of the fragments 

 are relatively fresh. The chief animal agents operating on the bones, 

 however, are porcupines, for only 29 of the 168 have escaped their 

 attention. The presence of a human temporal bone and femur together 

 with nearby deserted stone circles also complicates the picture. 



At Mala Mala two hyena lairs had been investigated by Alun R. 

 Hughes and H. F. N. Harington in 1953, and one of them — an old ant- 

 bear warren — was completely excavated; the only skeletal remains 

 extracted from both of these lairs was the intact carapace of a tortoise 

 that had apparently fallen into the warren and failed to find its way 

 out. (Hughes, 1954a, b). 



Hyenas, therefore, under the pressure of human proximity, may 

 collect at a single locality (but not in, a den) from the kills they make 



