once upon a time the clouds split with a blinding flash, a huge Anglo-Saxon finger pointed down, and immediately the earth was populated with dinosaurs and cavemen. And if, let’s say, a bona fide living breathing furry link could in fact be produced—a specimen undeniably half-and-half—you may be sure it would be angrily rejected, identified either as a peculiar chimpanzee or as a hairy little man with rickets.
The skull seems to be the determining factor. If the skull looks reasonably human—well then, the owner must have been human. Otherwise it was some sort of ape.
Consider the brow, the jaw, the dome. Especially the dome. Is it high, capacious, handsomely rounded?—a suitable receptacle for a human brain? If so, we have Man. Hominidae. Glory of the universe.
Does it resemble a football?—flattened, unimposing, diminutive? Then we have Pongidae, brute keeper of the forest.
The problem with such attractive and shapely logic may be illustrated by the fact that Lord Byron’s brain measured 2,350 cubic centimeters while that of Anatole France measured just 1,100. It should follow, therefore, that Lord Byron was at least twice as intelligent as Anatole France. You see the brambles on this path.
Besides, the average cranial capacity of Cro-Magnon skulls is 1,650 cubic centimeters while that of modern Europeans is about 1,400—which implies that the human brain is shrinking. It could be. And perhaps for the best.
But this leads in another direction, so let’s return to the Transvaal, to Professor Dart patiently sifting the earth for additional scraps of Australopithecus.
In the Makapan valley he discovered where a troop of these “chimpanzees” had stopped, and the campsite revealed gruesome proof of human behavior—an assortment of baboon skulls together with that of another Australopithecus child. The jaw of each baboon skull, as well as that of the child, had been broken in such a way as to suggest a feast. Chimpanzees customarily eat plants and fruit, not baboons, nor do adult chimps eat their own children. So, Dart reasoned, these creatures a million years ago were evolving rapidly.
He showed his skull collection to an expert in forensic medicine who told him that the Australo infant and forty-two baboons had been dispatched by powerful blows with a hard object. Dart suspected that the hard object, or objects, might still be around. Presently he found them: antelope leg bones. In some instances a particular bone could be fitted to the break in a particular skull. The fragile, porcelain-thin skulls of infant baboons had been emptied of their brains, then crushed and tossed aside, says Dart, just as a human child might crush and throw away a breakfast eggshell.
He published an article about these carnivorous Transvaal citizens in 1949, and being a scientist he gave it an appropriate title: “The Predatory Implemental Techniques of Australopithecus.” Very few people who read it liked it.
Six years later a scientific congress met at the town of Livingstone near Victoria Falls. Dart was allotted twenty minutes, which meant he scarcely had time to summarize what he had learned. His talk seems to have been ignored. Many of the scientists did not bother to look at the exhibit he had prepared. Those skulls could not have been fractured by our ancestors. Probably a band of hyenas killed the baboons. Or some leopards. Or it could be that porcupines, which occasionally collect bones to chew on—porcupines might be responsible.
Said von Koenigswald, speaking for most of the Establishment: “It is easy to take such bones for implements, and this is in fact often done. But a comparison of the picture produced by Dart shows without any doubt that these bones have been gnawed and split by hyenas.”
However, a British paleontologist named Sutcliffe who had spent a great deal of time studying hyenas did not agree. He said it would be uncharacteristic of hyenas to leave all those skulls around. Hyenas pulverize everything. Then, too, some rudimentary “tools” were unearthed in the Australo encampment, and the shaping of implements for a specific purpose is a trait that distinguishes Homo sapiens from beasts.
Rather cautiously the professionals began revising their opinion of Dart’s exhibit.
Meanwhile, Dr. Broom had been attracted to the Sterkfontein lime-works where some fossils were turning up. The plant manager, Mr. Barlow, previously had worked at Taungs and he now understood that there were commodities other than lime; he was gathering fossils and selling them to tourists. Through him Dr. Broom got a few interesting bones, though nothing important. Then one day Mr. Barlow said, “I’ve something nice for you this morning.” And he produced a jaw with recently broken teeth which Broom bought for two pounds. However, because the matrix looked different, Broom suspected it had not been dug out of the quarry. When asked about this, Barlow grew evasive. Dr. Broom therefore returned to the limeworks on the manager’s day off and showed the jaw to some workmen. None of them recognized it.
Broom then had a serious talk with the plant manager, who admitted he had gotten the jaw from a boy named Gert Terblanche. Broom drove to the Terblanche home. Gert was at school. Broom drove immediately to the school. He arrived just after noon, during playtime, and spoke to the headmaster. The boy was located and took out of his pocket “four of the most wonderful teeth ever seen in the world’s history.” These teeth, says Broom, “I promptly purchased from Gert, and transferred to my own pocket.”
The boy had noticed the jaw protruding from a ledge. He had worked it loose by beating it with a rock, which accounted for the broken teeth.
In 1939 the price of lime dropped, closing the Sterkfontein quarry, and the Second World War further restricted archaeological work.
After the war Prime Minister Jan Smuts asked Dr. Broom to see what else he could find at Sterkfontein. Barlow was now dead, but from him Dr. Broom had learned to appreciate dynamite, so that very soon the vast African silence was being thunderously violated. And almost at once, remarks William Howells, first-rate fossils began describing small arcs in the air to the tune of his blasts.
The most startling find was an immensely powerful jaw—a jaw so massive that its owner came to be known as the Nutcracker Man. Further bits and pieces of these robust nutcracker people, or near-people, revealed the significant fact that their skulls had been crested like the skulls of orangutans or gorillas.
Dart and Broom now were convinced that East Africa was where it all began, but very few professionals agreed with them. Africa seemed rather distant. One would expect humanity’s cradle to be nearer the center of things. Not that our first squiggly tracks ought to show up on Thames mud or the Champs-Élysées, but Africa did seem remote. A more familiar setting—Italy or Greece, let’s say—would be perfect. The Dutch East Indies, possibly. Java might be acceptable. Perhaps China.
Louis Leakey then clambered out of the Olduvai Gorge where he had been prospecting for eighteen years, and he brought undeniable news.
Olduvai is a Masai word for the sansevieria plant which grows wild in that area. The gorge is about 25 miles long and 300 feet deep: a parched canyon where anthropologists, rhinos, cobras, and black-maned lions go about their business in dignified solitude, except for an occasional truckload of apprehensive tourists from Nairobi. It is a splendid place to study human evolution because quite a lot was happening here and because erosion has made it possible for scientists to get at the remains.
Archaeologist Hans Reck commented in 1913: “It is rare for strata to be so clearly distinguishable from one another as they are at Olduvai, the oldest at the bottom, the most recent at the top, undisturbed by a single gap, and never indurated or distorted by mountain-building forces.”
Leakey, with his wife Mary, camped season after season at the edge, walked down into the gorge looking for bones, and shared a water hole with various large animals. “We could never get
