Hottentot peoples around their Namib Desert villages of Namibia 

 and then chewed by their dogs, I found 87 distal humerus pieces, 

 but not a single proximal end. The reason was clear: while the distal 

 humerus is a solid, dense piece of bone with a relatively high spe- 

 cific gravity, the same was not true of the upper end. This is a 

 fragile, spongy structure with a much lower specific gravity, and is 

 easily destroyed for the nutrients it contains. 



Interestingly enough, the overall survival of goat skeletal parts in 

 the Namib sample (Brain, 1961, 1981a) closely mirrored the figures 

 that Dart had encountered in his sample of antelope bones from 

 Makapansgat, so there was no longer any reason to invoke deliberate 

 hominid selection to explain the discrepancies. Before publishing 

 anything on this finding, I showed the Namib bones and results to 

 Dart and explained the implications for his osteodontokeratic cul- 

 tural concept. It was obvious that these results undermined the basis 

 of Dart's theory, and for about 10 minutes he was taken aback and 

 perplexed. But after this initial dismay, he became increasingly en- 

 thusiastic, saying "this is wonderful — now at last we are getting 

 closer to the truth." Rather than condemning this young upstart who 

 was upsetting his cherished concept, Dart nominated me for an 

 award. I realized then that he was much more interested in the sub- 

 ject of his investigations than in his position relative to them and 

 that he was one of those rare individuals with true generosity of 

 spirit, particularly in this rather emotional field of paleoanthropol- 

 ogy. 



As the discipline of African cave taphonomy crystallised, more 

 and more of Dart's concepts of "the blood-bespattered archives of 

 humanity" were seriously questioned. It became apparent, for in- 

 stance, that the Makapansgat bones were more likely to have been 

 collected by striped hyenas than by hominids. Although he freely 

 admitted the accuracy of alternative explanations, I doubt that Dart 

 ever truly discarded his Makapansgat-based concepts entirely. For 

 instance, during the course of our Swartkrans investigation, we 

 found about 60 pieces of bone that had apparently been used as 

 digging tools, the characteristics of which we were able to replicate 

 on modern bones used for that purpose (Brain and Shipman, 1993). 

 I was anxious to show these specimens to Dart and ask for his 



