Science: Diggers

The theory that man originated in Africa got a boost when a nearly complete lower jaw of Australopithecus prometheus was found at Makapansgat in the Transvaal this month. Anthropologists now have most of the skull parts (from different individuals) of a “proto-man” who probably lived one million years ago, along with saber-toothed tigers and giant hyenas. Professor Raymond A. Dart of Witwatersrand University gave Prometheus his name because some of his bones contained free carbon, which indicates that they had been burned, and hints at the use of fire.

Prometheus stood more or less upright (proved by the fact that his spinal cord entered the skull from below). His teeth were more human thai, apelike, and there is evidence that, like Samson, he used animal jawbones as clubs. Dr. Dart also reported on a stone-working creature that lived in the Transvaal 500,000 to 750,000 years ago. His primitive “pebble tools” have been found in gravel pits, but no bones have been found.

When biologists try to figure out where a creature originated, they look for the place where its primitive forms, living or extinct, are found in the greatest variety. Therefore, the remains that have been found in Africa suggest to Dr. Dart that Africa was the place where humans gradually evolved, with many false starts, from some prehuman stock.

Stopping Dimwit. Another primitive African, undoubtedly human, was recently found by Keith Jolly of the University of Cape Town and described by Professor M. R. Drennan in Britain’s Nature magazine. In a “blowout” (wind-eroded area) near Saldanha, 80 miles north of Cape Town, Jolly found the ground littered with the bones of extinct animals: mammoths, giant wart hogs and a primitive giraffe. Among the bones were 25 fragments that fitted together into a thick-walled, beetle-browed human skull.

To judge from the attachments for the muscles of the nape of his neck, Saldanha man must have walked with a pronounced stoop. He had somewhat less room for brain than Neanderthal man, who is generally considered an unpresentable uncle of modern man, but he had the wit to make and use stone tools. Crude hand axes were found in the blow-out among the bones. Since many anthropologists define man as “the toolmaking mammal,” Saldanha will have to be recognized as a genuine, if uncouth, man.

Arab Explorers. Another Witwatersrand professor, Dr. M.D.W. Jeffreys, has been working on a more recent problem of African history: Did Africans make contact with the Western Hemisphere before the time of Columbus? Dr. Jeffreys thinks that they did, and he bases his theory on pottery made about 900 A.D. by the Yoruba tribe of West Africa. Some of it appears to have been decorated by rolling a corncob over wet clay. Since corn almost certainly originated in the Americas, this suggests that Africans, or Arabs sailing from Africa, crossed to the New j World 500 years before Columbus and brought Indian corn back with them.

To check his theory, Dr. Jeffreys studied names which ancient African tribes gave to corn. He found that many of them called it by the name of the tribe to the north or the northeast of them. So he concludes that American corn was not brought to coastal Africa by the Spanish or Portuguese but that it came overland from the north, probably introduced by earlier Arab navigators.

Mogollon Eden. A small, neat, American civilization, 800 years dead, has been excavated in northern New Mexico. It belonged to the Mogollon Indians, unknown until a few years ago. In the Bulletin of the Chicago Natural History Museum, Anthropologist Paul S. Martin reports how he and some assistants spent last summer carefully digging up a two-story Mogollon “apartment house.” The upper parts had fallen in, but the lower rooms were still intact. In one, the diggers found five well-carved stone objects: two animal effigies, a dish, a tubular tobacco pipe and a disk about eight inches across painted with sunlike rays—probably the sacred apparatus of a household shrine. Under the floors of other rooms were 14 skeletons, mostly of young children. Each had supplies of clothing, jewelry, food and pottery. This proves, says Dr. Martin, that Mogollon parents had risen far above savagery. The Mogollones lacked metals, but they were good craftsmen in bone, stone,’textiles, basketry and clay. For food they raised corn, beans and squash, and supplemented them with game, wild fruits and nuts.

The walls of their well-constructed houses were solidly built of stones cemented with clay. Most surprising feature: a kind of air conditioning. Underground ducts led fresh air to the center of inner, windowless rooms. When a fire was lighted, the warm air rose through a hole in the ceiling, drawing cool air from the duct. If the room got too cold, the duct could be regulated by placing a flat stone over its mouth.

There were probably never more than 5,000 Mogollones, and their fate is a mystery. About 1300 A.D., their snug little nation perished, no one knows how.