Science: The First Fireman

A million years ago (more or less), a race of pygmies lived on the treeless savannas of what is now the central Transvaal. These little people had apelike faces, stood possibly four feet high and weighed up to 100 Ibs. When they died, a few happened to leave their bones in lime-bearing rock where they would be preserved for eons.

Modern man, always looking for the elusive “missing link” (more properly, a common ancestor of apes and men), has been digging up these fossils for a quarter of a century. With each new find he has been thinking a little better of his second cousins, 50,000 times removed.

In the current American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Anthropologist Raymond Arthur Dart, of Johannesburg, gives the Transvaal pygmies their biggest boost up the evolutionary ladder. At one time, Dart had called them Australopithecus (southern ape). Now he wishes that he had named them Homunculus (little man). They appear to have been brainy beyond their size and times. Their brainpans (650 cc) were almost as big as those of their bigger (5 ft. 8 in.) contemporaries, the Men of Java.

Says Dart: “These intelligent, energetic, erect and delicately-proportioned little people were as competent as any other primitive human group in cavern life made comfortable by the use of fire, in the employment of long bones as lethal weapons, in the cunning and courage of the chase and in internecine strife.”

An abandoned lime quarry at Makapangsgat, Transvaal, yielded two bones last year to Dart’s diggers: part of an occiput (the back part of the skull) and a lower, jaw, from a pygmy moppet who had died while still getting his second teeth. Near by were many baboon skulls, bashed in from above or behind with a club which had a ridged head (the distal end of the humerus).*

Most startling was Dart’s evidence, from a number of charred bones, that the little man had learned to use fire. He lived in the early Ice Age, from 300,000 to 500,000 years before Peking Man, hitherto the earliest known user of fire. In honor of both his fire-bringing record and his prophetic skills, the new little man was named Australopithecus prometheus.

*The protohumans probably hunted baboons by blocking all but one exit of a baboon cave colony, then clubbing the apes from the side as they ran, the gauntlet.