THE PROBLEM OF ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AUSTRALIA 39 
_ but are separated by an irregular broken surface (Plate ILI, figs. 
5and 6). The cuts were considered by De Vis to have been made 
_ byasharp implement, not by teeth of carnivores, and in his opinion 
the specimen is an artefact. Gregory (1904) rejected this sugges- 
tion, and held that the cuts were made accidentally by the shovel 
of the miner who unearthed the bone. The surface of each cut, 
however, is not flat as would be expected if made with a shovel; 
one, especially, looks like the result of several short strokes of a 
pocket knife used as in cutting plug tobacco. Possibly the miner 
who found it tested its hardness in this way. The shape of the 
fragment and the relative positions of the cuts do not suggest an 
artefact. A. 8. Kenyon, who examined the specimen at about the 
same time as Gregory, recorded that the cuts had crushed the 
ites in the bone, and were therefore made after the bone had 
| fossilized (Mahony and others, 1933). Many years ago the 
specimen was covered with size to prevent oxidation of the pyrites; 
no pyrites can now be seen and it is therefore difficult to determine 
the appearance of the cuts when the bone was found. A face cut 
for experimental purposes in 1934 on one of the other Buninyong 
bones has exactly the same appearance as those on the supposed 
artefact. De Vis identified one of the other fragments as probably 
the head of the same rib from which supposed artefact was made; 
if this is correct, it seems more reasonable to suppose that the bone 
was broken by the jaws of a carnivore than that a man would make 
an implement out of one part of the rib and then discard it close 
tothe rejected portion. The specimen was formerly in the Ballarat 
School of Mines but is now in the National Museum of Victoria, 
Melbourne. 
Cuts and scratches on bones of extinct marsupials from the 
Darling Downs, Queensland, and several localities in Victoria, 
considered by some observers to have been made by human agency, 
have been attributed to tooth marks of the marsupial lion, Thyla- 
coleo, by De Vis (1884) and by Spencer and Walcott (1912). 
J. E. Tenison Woods (1883, 1886) noticed sears on the bone of 
a large struthious bird associated with midden material near 
Penola, South Australia, and suggested that they were made by 
aborigines; he considered that the bird is the extinet Dromornis." 
_ Asmall quartzite upper mill stone (Plate ILI, figs. 1 and 2) was 
found in 1908 by A. J. Merry of Terang while making an excava- 
tion for the foundations of a concrete culvert over Pejark Swamp 
drainage channel where it crosses the road from Terang to Noorat, 
Victoria. One side has been rubbed flat, and a depression (‘‘husk- 
ing hole’’) has been made on the other (Plate ILI, figs. 5 and 6) ; 
IL. See also Etheridge (1890). 
