332 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



discuss tools and their place in the origin and development of human 

 speech to show the general bearing of the information gleaned from 

 this deposit upon academic tool concepts, as well as upon living man's 

 distinctive attributes. 



THE SECONDARY STATUS OF STONE 



It has been customary hitherto to imagine that stone formed man's 

 first real tool material, and that, although man has been a hunter for 

 about 1,000,000 years, he never seriously used teeth or tusks as tools or 

 employed bones and horns (and then only as tool parts) mitil the 

 Aurignacian epoch, i. e., about 25,000 years ago. There is, of course, 

 no question that in the Aurignacian and succeeding archeological 

 periods these osteodontokeratic materials found numerous novel tech- 

 nical and artistic applications in human industries, but those very 

 novelties have merely served to conceal the primary or ancestral 

 usages discussed here. The palatal scraper has been overlooked ; and 

 the saw, regarded heretofore as an acquisition of neolithic or, at most, 

 mesolithic antiquity, has been revealed at Makapansgat as the prime 

 possession of primitive mankind. 



Skeletal parts, having been adapted by nature to destructive ends, 

 were a complete answer to the early hunter's prayer for tools ; yet the 

 relative indestructibility of stone has exercised so mesmeric an influ- 

 ence upon terminology-loving archeologists that the primary place of 

 these skeletal or osteodontokeratic materials in the paleolithic domestic 

 economy of man has been either obscured or completely hidden. Just 

 as metals came after stone and did not replace stone in human economy 

 but only led to new uses and applications of stone, so Makapansgat 

 shov7s that stone pebbles came after bone, tooth, and horn, and when 

 first introduced as missiles and choppers, pebbles did not and could 

 not supplant all the uses skeletal materials subserved in human econ- 

 omy ; pebble tools merely assisted their osteodontokeratic forerunners 

 by taking over to some extent the functions of the chopper and cutting 

 edge. 



The ancestral osteodontokeratic culture enforces upon us, first, a 

 recognition of the limited tasks that even our metal tools, however 

 complicated, can execute, and second, an appreciation of the compre- 

 hensive response of osteodontokeratic tools to those tasks in their 

 basic forms from the outset. Archeology's teeming terminology, 

 based not so much on the work tools do but on fine typological varia- 

 tions, creates the false impression that the variety of tools needed by 

 stone-age man should correspond in some degree with the immensity of 

 our lithic nomenclature, which is chiefly geographical. Basically, 

 however, the human hand can perform but three kinds of motion, 

 namely, pulling objects toward the body (or adducting), pushing 



