but exceeded that of any of the extant apes. It may be inferred that anything 

 a chimpanzee or a gorilla can do Australopithecus could have done— and 

 probably could have done better! If a chimpanzee can "fish" for termites and 

 make sharpened crowbars for opening banana-boxes, so could Australopithe- 

 cus have done in a similar problem situation. If gorillas can make comfort- 

 able, sprung beds, so might Australopithecus. If chimpanzees can break a 

 circular disc of wood to make a narrow stick with which to extract food from 

 a cylinder, so too could Australopithecus have done in a similar problem 

 situation. 



This being so, all the evidence indicates that we should group Australo- 

 pithecus, along with the great apes and man, among the "cultural Primates" 

 as designated by Kortlandt and Kooij (1963). We should expect that Aus- 

 tralopithecus could go even further than these very intelligent actions of 

 the apes. 



Hence, on ecological, anatomical, functional, and comparative grounds, 

 there is a strong a priori case for Australopithecus having been a tool-user 

 and -maker. Is this inference supported by any direct implemental evidence? 



Direct evidence on cultural activities by 

 Australopithecus 



As recently as 1964, Le Gros Clark wrote: "Practically nothing is known 

 of the activities or mode of life of Australopithecus" (1964, p. 171). This 

 seems to reflect a poor yield of facts forty years after the first discovery of 

 Australopithecus. A closer look may, however, show us that, with due allow- 

 ance for the uncertainties of all archaeological interpretation, we have reason 

 to believe that we are approaching some knowledge and some understanding 

 of the cultural life of Australopithecus. 



Cultural objects of bone, horn, and tooth. Since our first excava- 

 tions began at the australopithecine site of Makapansgat, 200 miles north of 

 Johannesburg, some twenty-five years ago, we have kept every single speci- 

 men—including slivers and fragments— of fossilized bone developed from 

 the tough matrix or breccia. We now have over 100,000 classified pieces of 

 bone from this ape-man bearing site. A study of some of these specimens first 

 convinced Dart (1956b, 1957) that many of them had been used as tools, 

 perhaps in the same adventitious way that sticks and stones are used by 

 higher Primates. Closer study revealed consistent patterns of breakage in 

 many specimens. They suggested to Dart that not only had these bones been 

 used as tools but they had been deliberately modified over and above their 



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