Throughout this project, Dart's style of writing was dramatic and 

 forceful, unlike the kind of writing normally encountered in serious 

 scientific publications. On several occasions, I asked him why he 

 had chosen this particular approach. His answer was direct and sim- 

 ple: "that will get them talking," he said, and he certainly succeeded 

 in his objective. Dart's ideas generated an enormous amount of in- 

 terest and controversy in scientific and lay circles alike and provoked 

 various people, including myself, to re-evaluate his claims. Another 

 person affected by Dart was the American dramatist and playwright 

 Robert Ardrey who was so captivated by his ideas on early human 

 nature that he wrote a series of books on the topic, starting with 

 African genesis — A personal investigation into the animal origins 

 and nature of man (1961). These works were very influential in 

 stimulating widespread discussion on the behavior of human ances- 

 tors. 



At the time Dart first presented his conclusions on the "osteo- 

 dontokeratic culture" at the 3rd Pan African Congress on Prehistory, 

 held in Livingstone during 1955, I was busy with a Ph.D. project 

 on the caves from which the hominid fossils had come. In this con- 

 nection I had interacted regularly with Dart, particularly with regard 

 to the Makapansgat cave and I was enthralled with his ideas of "the 

 predatory transition from ape to man." I developed three ambitious 

 goals at that time: the first was to analyze, as Dart had done, the 

 fossil accumulations from other hominid-bearing cave sites; the sec- 

 ond was to excavate one of those cave deposits myself; and the third 

 was to document the factors responsible for bone accumulations in 

 caves. I had to wait until 1965 for this opportunity to materialize, 

 at which time I was appointed paleontologist at the Transvaal Mu- 

 seum in succession to Robert Broom and John Robinson. I then 

 started on a 25-year-long investigation of the Swartkrans cave and 

 its fossil assemblages, and I will be returning to this episode in the 

 course of the lecture. 



When I started to analyze other ancient and modern fossil bone 

 assemblages, it soon became apparent that skeletal disproportions 

 were widespread and the inevitable result of the fact that some skel- 

 etal parts survive destructive treatment better than others. As an 

 example, in a sample of modern goat bones discarded by Nama 



