SOUTH AFRICAN MAN- APES — DART 331 



tree-browsing creatures that dragged down branches with their split- 

 clawed hooves ; six of them are represented in the deposit, but of bones 

 other than cranial fragments we found only one of their claws. With 

 the antelopes, too, of all 293 represented (39 large, 126 medium, 100 

 small, and 28 very small) the parts of the legs below the ankles and 

 wrist joints were taken into the cave by the hundreds, but only four of 

 the hoof phalanges are left to tell the tale of what they were used for. 

 Obviously the parts below the hocks would have been useless as food ; 

 they were needed desperately as tools, as double-ended clubs. 



The most numerous of all skeletal fragments found in the deposit are 

 369 lower jaws (mandibles) of antelopes; the next most frequent are 

 the 336 double-ridged lower ends of their humeri. Clearly no accident 

 had been responsible for our discovery years ago that baboon and 

 australopithecine skull fractures on the one hand and the double- 

 ridged humeri on the other hand bore a reciprocal relation to one an- 

 other ; but this greater frequency of mandibular fragments was quite 

 unexpected. 



The angle of an antelope half-mandible, if swung by its front end, 

 can cut through flesh like a scimitar ; the incisor teeth, or the broken 

 front end of an antelope's lower jaw, can penetrate an animal's belly 

 like a sharp sword point; but the greatest service such a jaw can render 

 is with its sharp serrated teeth to saw through skin, flesh, or wood. 

 The smaller the antelope the narrower the saw blade formed by its 

 molar-premolar series of teeth; and the closer it approximates that 

 most fundamental of all human tools, the linear edge — ^the schoolboy's 

 pocket knife, the housewife's carving knife. Of the smallest types of 

 antelopes, such as the duiker, no vertebrae or limb bones of any sort 

 were to be found, only skull fragments ; and of these skull fragments, 

 no less than 53 are these narrow little knife blades (see pi. 4). 



The upper jaws of antelopes, unlike those of carnivores, are not furn- 

 ished with ferocious fangs, but the dental arcades in their palates form 

 a regularly serrated broad arch ; and this makes as perfect an abrasive 

 surface as primitive humanity required down to Mousterian and later 

 times. Right down to modern times, among the Bavenda and Bapedi 

 tribes of the Transvaal, the palatal tooth series of oxen are employed 

 in the scraping and softening of skins. There is little likelihood that 

 the Australopithecinae used skins for clothing, but they needed imple- 

 ments to scrape meat off bones and fat off skins for food. The hundreds 

 of isolated maxillary teeth, like the hundreds of madibular teeth found 

 in the breccia, show that these natural scrapers and saws experienced 

 the hard use that justifies their profuse occurrence in the deposit. 



This is not the place to delve more deeply into the individual func- 

 tions subserved by each of the bones of the antelope body in the hunting 

 work and domestic economy of the manlike apes ; but it is relevant to 



