Lower Pleistocene may have been an exceptional and atypical group for 

 their time: their peripheral and ecologically difficult situation may have 

 elicited— or retained— bone tool-making as one of several possible solutions 

 to the challenge of their environment. In eastern Africa bone seems to have 

 played a relatively minor role as a cultural solution resorted to by early 

 Pleistocene hominids. There, at any rate, by about the same time, another 

 solution— stone tool-making— had been adopted, very probably by somewhat 

 more advanced hominids. The bone artefacts of Makapansgat may even 

 represent the persistence in southern Africa of a yet earlier, possibly Mio- 

 Pliocene, phase of cultural hominization— in much the same way as the 

 African subcontinental cul-de-sac has so often preserved, and indeed still con- 

 serves, archaic species of animals long after their extinction in more north- 

 erly latitudes. 



Indeed, Pilbeam and Simons (1965) have spoken of evidence, direct and 

 indirect, for the existence of small-canined, bipedal, and possibly tool-using 

 hominids in the late Miocene or early Pliocene, while Leakey (1967, 1968) 

 has claimed that bones found in the Upper Miocene fossil beds of Fort Ter- 

 nan, Kenya, show evidence of having been broken up or hammered by some 

 kind of blunt instrument. It is true, as Bielicki points out, that 



the possibility must be reckoned with that those hominids were not at all 

 ancestral to the hominids known from the Pleistocene, but represented a result of 

 a quite independently initiated, and for some reason "not completed" hominizing 

 trend within one or more species of Tertiary catarrhines. Such a supposition 

 would be in line with the . . . possibility that hominizing tendencies could have 

 recurred several times in the history of other Primates, as well as with the well- 

 known "dehumanization hypothesis" advanced by Kortlandt and Kooij (1963). 

 [Bielicki 1969, p. 60] 



However, the possibility remains that these earliest cultural ventures 

 may have involved the use of bone and that this cultural tradition may have 

 survived in some parts of the continent. In that event, the Makapansgat 

 cultural manifestation may represent a late and perhaps final expression of 

 such cultural activities, with a minimum incorporation of stone into the 

 hardware of the material culture. 





133 l< 



