Cultural status

It has long been known that pebble-tools were made in Africa during the period of the australopithecines. But there have been two schools of thought on the relationship between the fossils and the implements. According to one view, Australopithecus was the maker of these stone implements. The notion has been forthrightly expressed by J. D. Clark as recently as 1963: ‘To take the example of the australopithecines:–Few would now doubt that they were representative of a hominid form responsible for the Pre-Chelles-Acheul Culture’ (p. 356). This view has been espoused by Arambourg (1958), by Oakley (1961, 1964) although he earlier (1954, 1956) took the opposing view, by Washburn (1959), Washburn and Howell (1960), Washburn and De Vore (1961), and others.

Exponents of the second view have doubted whether the australopithecines were stone toolmakers (Robinson and Mason, 1957, 1962; Inskeep, 1959; Mason, 1961; von Koenigswald, 1961, etc.).

In favour of the first view are the contemporaneity of the australopithecines and the pebbletools, and the discovery of a fragmentary, apparently australopithecine maxilla and a few possible pebble-tools in the same layer near the top of the Makapansgat deposit (Brain, Van Riet Lowe and Dart, 1955; Dart, 1955b). This discovery Dart (1955b) described as ‘providing the first concrete evidence that an australopithecine type…was contemporaneous with, and may have been responsible for, the concomitant pebble culture found in this sealed Central Transvaal cavern deposit’.