Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

In 1925, Raymond A. Dart investigated a tunnel at Makapansgat, South Africa. Noting the presence of blackened bones, Dart (1925) concluded hominids had used fire there. In 1945, Philip V. Tobias, then Dart’s graduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand, found the skull of an extinct baboon in the cave deposits of Makapansgat and called it to Dart’s attention. In 1947, Dart himself went back out into the field, after a lapse of two decades, to hunt for Australopithecus bones at Makapansgat.

At Makapansgat, Dart (1948) found australopithecine skull fragments (including an occipital) and other bones, along with more signs of fire. Dart therefore called the creature who lived there Australopithecus prometheus, after the Titan who stole fire from the gods. Today, Australopithecus prometheus is classified, along with the Taung and Sterkfontein specimens, as Australopithecus africanus, distinct from the robust australopithecines of Kromdraai and Swartkrans.

Most of the Makapansgat fossils came from dumps of broken rock in front of the quarry there. From the matrix surrounding the fossils, Dart said he was able to correlate them with identifiable fossil-bearing strata nearby. Had anatomically modern human fossils been recovered in such fashion, any claims for their great age would have been subjected to merciless criticism. This is because the main hominid layers at Makapansgat have been dated at about 3 million years by paleomagnetic methods (K. Weaver 1985, p. 596).

Dart discovered 42 baboon skulls at Makapansgat, 27 of which had smashed fronts. Seven more showed blows on the left front side (Dart 1959, p. 106). Dart, suspecting that australopithecines had been the cause of the damage, requested that R. H. Mackintosh, a specialist in forensic medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand, examine the skulls. Dart and Mackintosh concluded that the skulls showed signs of having been struck by a “powerful downward, forward, and inward blow, delivered from the rear upon the right parietal bone by a double-headed object” (Wendt 1972, p. 224). They believed the weapon was an antelope’s humerus (the bone of the upper forelimb). The joint of an antelope humerus, noted Dart, exactly fit the double impressions on several broken baboon skulls.

From the evidence he gathered at Makapansgat, Dart created a lurid portrait of Australopithecus prometheus as a killer ape-man, bashing in the heads of baboons with primitive bone tools and cooking their flesh over fires in the Makapansgat cave. While his robust cousins had remained in the forest, peacefully munching vegetables, and becoming extinct, this more advanced hominid had, according to Dart, ventured into the dry savannahs, to survive by his ruthless wits, and begin the long journey to humanity.

Dart said: “Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers; carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring their writhing flesh” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 40).

Dart and Mackintosh also ascertained that australopithecines were killed in the same way as the baboons (Wendt 1972, pp. 226–227). “Australopithecus lived a grim life,” wrote Dart (1959, p. 191). “He ruthlessly killed fellow australopithecines and fed upon them as he would upon any other beast, young or old.”

Today, however, paleoanthropologists characterize Dart’s portrait of Australopithecus as somewhat exaggerated. Johanson and Edey (1981, p. 65) call the vision of the killer ape-man “something of an embarrassment to anthropologists, who honor Dart for his dazzling recognition of the first australopithecine, but shake their heads over this later aberration.”

In addition to antelope bones, Dart collected at Makapansgat many other animal remains that he believed had been used as daggers, choppers, saws, clubs, and so forth. He grouped these into what he called an “osteodontokeratic” industry, comprising tools made from bones, teeth, and horns (Dart 1957). In 1954, C. K. Brain found pebble tools at Makapansgat, 25 feet above the main layers in which the australopithecine fossils were found. One possible conclusion: a hominid more advanced than Australopithecus was the maker of the tools. But Dart (1959, pp. 159–160) pointed out that Australopithecus skeletal fragments were also to be found in the same layer as the pebble tools.

Dart’s views about Australopithecus hunting activity at Makapansgat aroused heavy opposition. Some scientists said that the combination of Australopithecus fossils, mammalian bones, and broken baboon skulls represented not hominid occupation sites but the lairs of hyenas or leopards.