TEN 



$ THE EARLY EXPRESSION OF STONE 



G CULTURE 



It lias long been known that primitive stone tools were manufactured 

 in Africa during australopithecine times. Opinion has been acutely divided, 

 however, as to whether Australopithecus was their maker. In 1965, I gave a 

 detailed review of the evidence as well as of the opinions for and against this 

 hypothesis. It seemed to me then (lo^d) and subsequently (1967a, 1968c, 

 1969b) that the balance of evidence was against Australopithecus having been 

 the maker of the first systematic, cultural stone tools. My view agreed with 

 that of Mason (1957, 1961, 1962) and of Robinson (1957, 1958, 1959, 1962a), 

 as well as those of Inskeep (1959), von Koenigswald (1961, 1968), and others, 

 that "Australopithecus is unlikely to have made the stone artefacts— it seems 

 more likely that Telanthropus was responsible" (Robinson 1959, p. 585); 

 and again, "It is not impossible, in view of the evidence accumulated by 

 Dart, that Australopithecus had an 'osteodontokeratic' but not an established 

 stone culture, but that Telanthropus did have the latter" (ibid., p. 585). 



Some of the evidence was indirect or associational. Thus, speaking of 

 the stone implements found in the Sterkfontein Middle Breccia, Mason 

 stated: 



It is unlikely that a complex technology would be practiced by australopithecines 

 on one end of Africa and pithecanthropines on the other [the discoveries in 

 Algeria and Morocco]. We have, therefore, good reason to suspect that pithecan- 

 thropines made the Sterkfontein [stone] artefacts and may have killed the 

 australopithecine whose remains lie near the artefacts. Here we have the least 

 speculative of all the varying interpretations that have been given to the Sterk- 

 fontein discoveries. We may not have to look to North Africa for a suitable 

 hominid for, as J. T. Robinson has indicated, one lies at nearby Swartkrans in 

 the form of Telanthropus. [Mason 1961, p. 14] 



Since he has accepted the reassignation of Telanthropus as pithecanthro- 

 pine, Mason states elsewhere that "we may now see [the australopithe- 

 cines] as the unsuccessful competitors of progressive pithecanthropines who 

 were making tools of Acheulean type" (Mason 1962, p. 124). 



Robinson's evidence was likewise largely indirect and circumstantial. 



% 134 



