SOUTH AFRICAN MAN-APES — DART 335 



making, as distinct from using," might be employed to distinguish the 

 Australopithecinae from the later members of the Ilominidae; the 

 unjustifiable presumption in both instances being that tools were not 

 made until some of them were fabricated from stone. It would be as 

 reasonable to suggest that metal-age man differs mentally from stone- 

 age man, or atomic-age man from carriage-drawn man, as to hold that 

 the making of tools from pebbles necessarily implied a cerebral revolu- 

 tion in bone-, tooth-, and horn-using humanity. That is also why the 

 discovery of pebble tools and an australopithecine maxillary fragment 

 at the Limeworks site is not incongruous. 



TOOLS AND SPEECH 



The deposits of Taungs, Sterkfontein, and Makapansgat have told 

 thus far a coherent story not of fruit-eating, forest-loving apes but of 

 sanguinary pursuits and the predaceous habits of protomen. These 

 youth African manlike apes were human not only in being two-footed, 

 in maintaining the upright posture, and in having the facial form and 

 dental apparatus of humanity ; they were also human in their cave life, 

 in their love of flesh, in hunting wild game to procure their daily food ; 

 but most of all they were human in employing skeletal parts to sub- 

 serve the function of implements in the business of obtaining and 

 preparing that food, in getting it and dividing it. 



The Makapansgat Limeworks has provided detailed information 

 about the implemental intelligence of the South African protomen, 

 their osteodontokeratic clubs and choppers, pounders and scrapers, 

 projectiles and daggers, saws and knives, and has announced the 

 transition to pebble tools. In his remarkable essay on "The Processes 

 of History," Teggart (1918, p. 102) said : "Languages are made up of 

 words, but these are not consciously and systematically elaborated; 

 like the names in a scientific classification they come into existence 

 only as occasion demands and are elicited by objects, actions and 

 events. Before 'plowing,' 'sowing' and 'reaping' could have been 

 named these actions must have been performed and recognised." 



Just as the language of agriculture was based upon the nomenclature 

 of farming actions and the tools with which those farming actions were 

 performed, so man's earliest babblings must have been intimately con- 

 cerned with, nay erected upon, his "nomenclature" of hunting actions 

 and the tools with which those actions were performed. These hunting 

 tools were the skeletal parts of animals ; the prime and perpetual ob- 

 jects, upon which they acted, were also animals and their ])arts; the 

 tools themselves were activated by the hands and bodies of the hunters 

 while their bodies and limbs were in certain positions or postures ; their 

 entire food or bodily sustenance, so far as we know about it, consisted 

 of animals and their parts. Their entire thought processes concerned 



