336 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



animals and their parts. If, therefore, words are elicited by objects, 

 actions, and events, and if the fundamental object of inquiry in any 

 language is its idea system, as Teggart claimed, and if the aim of 

 speech, as he pointed out, is not the interchange of meaningless words 

 but the conveyance of ideas, then clearly the ideas these most primitive 

 hunters wished most to convey to their fellows throughout their entire 

 lives concerned entirely animals and their parts, whether hunting or 

 eating, whether preparing their tools for hunting, or dividing, by 

 their means, the spoils of hunting. 



Leslie A. White (1942) has realized that the essential difference be- 

 tween man and ape in respect to tools is not that man is more inventive : 

 the difference lies in the persistent place tools occupy in human think- 

 ing. "In the ape, tool experience is a series of discrete episodes ; the 

 inner experience begins and ends with the overt act. In man tool 

 experience is a continuum. Though the overt expression of the expe- 

 rience is disconnected and episodic, the inner experience is an miinter- 

 rupted flow and it is the symbol, the word- formed idea, that makes this 

 continuity of experience possible" (op. cit. p. 372). 



The actions and thoughts of hunting life were just as frequently and 

 repeatedly being imagined, performed, and experienced by the Aus- 

 tralopithecinae as by primitive hunting mankind. The Australopithe- 

 cinae recognized the implemental significance of these skeletal parts ; 

 they took them into their caverns and out upon their hunting expedi- 

 tions to subserve those same hunting ends. Dare we say that with 

 them tool experience was not a continuum ? Did they not also give 

 "names" to their tools and the actions they performed with them ? Or 

 were they, like deaf mutes, speechless and content only with gestures ? 

 We cannot say, but many distinguished scholars from Rae and Tylor to 

 Paget and Johannesson (see Paget, 1951, pp. 82-94) have insisted that 

 human speech had its origin in gestures. Again, as Oakley (1951, p. 

 72) has rightly observed, a human child "is usually beginning to talk 

 at the age of two years ; yet at that age a brain capacity of 650 cc. is 

 probably well within the normal range. Thus one cannot assume that 

 an adult Australopithecus with a brain of that size was incapable of 

 speech." 



Gestures only become meaningful when they symbolize actions; 

 actions attain specific significance as soon as they are regularly and 

 repeatedly performed by purposeful tools. According to White ( 1932, 

 p. 72) "the ape does not preserve his tools, nor does he talk about them. 

 Man does both. Civilization may be defined as the accumulated prod- 

 ucts of man's tool and symbol capacities; the former gives us the 

 material side of civilization and the latter the intellectual and 

 spiritual." 



Kroeber (1928, p. 336) had drawn attention a few years previously 

 to the chimpanzee's inability "outside of posed problems to manufac- 



