DO WE OWE OUR INTELLIGENCE TO A 

 PREDATORY PAST? 



As I am not a neuroscientist, it is an unexpected pleasure for me 

 to contribute a lecture to the James Arthur series on the Evolution 

 of the Human Brain. By contrast, I am an African naturalist, and 

 what I have to say will be very much from the perspective of Af- 

 rican cave taphonomy, a recent and rather macabre discipline that 

 uses fossils in an attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of death 

 of the animals involved, as well as to gain insights into their be- 

 havior and the paleoecology of the time. The lecture's focus will be 

 on predation. to which I am largely indebted to Professor Raymond 

 Dart, who provoked me into devoting many years of my life de- 

 veloping the principles of cave taphonomy and interpreting the bone 

 accumulations in southern African caves where hominid fossils have 

 been found. 



Raymond Dart's Preoccupation with the Process of Predation 



Thirty years after Dart's announcement in 1925 of the first African 

 early hominid that he named Australopithecus africanus, he turned 

 his attention to the Makapansgat limeworks cave in the Northern 

 Province of South Africa. Mining had brought to light numerous 

 fossils, and during the very year of 1925, a local schoolmaster from 

 a nearby town sent Dart blackened fossil bones from Makapansgat 

 that appeared to have been intentionally burnt. Dart concluded that 

 this must have been "a site of early human occupation" (Dart, 

 1925b) and when the first hominid fossil was found on the cave's 

 mine dumps, he designated it Australopithecus prometheus. His 

 claim of fire use among these hominids was later disputed by Ken- 

 neth Oakley in 1956. 



The mining operations at Makapansgat had brought to light a 

 layer of "grey breccia" low down in the sequence of the cave's 

 deposits that contained hundreds of thousands of fossilized bones. 

 Dart arranged for the extraction of over 7000 of these from their 

 travertine matrix and analyzed them as to skeletal part and the kinds 

 of animals from which they came. He found that the vast majority 



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