Aztec Treasure House

by Evan S. Connell

  Not so! Not so in the least! cried European authorities, none of whom had examined the South African infant.

  “Professor Dart is not likely to be led astray,” commented the British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith. “If he has thoroughly examined the skull we are prepared to accept his decision.” But presently Sir Arthur changed his mind: “. . . one is inclined to place Australopithecus in the same group or sub-family as the chimpanzee and gorilla. It is an allied genus. It seems to be near akin to both.”

  “There are serious doubts. . . .” wrote Smith-Woodward of Piltdown fame.

  “. . . the distorted skull of a chimpanzee just over four years old, probably a female,” said Professor Arthur Robinson.

  Not a hominid but an anthropoid ape, said Hans Weinert. Not a member of the human gallery, said Wilhelm Gieseler. Related to the gorilla, said Wolfgang Abel. And there were others. The consensus being that Dart’s child was a chimpanzee.

  Only one ranking professional agreed with Dart. This was Dr. Robert Broom, who looked like everybody’s grandfather, who spoke with a Scottish burr, and who had become widely known—however implausible it may sound—for studying reptiles in the Great Karoo. He is described as a small, elderly gentleman who invariably wore a business suit with a high, starched collar, a black necktie, and a black hat. This was his uniform no matter where he happened to be, even in the bush. He was a medical doctor and part-time paleontologist who liked to collect things. In Ardrey’s eloquent phrase: “fossils, Rembrandt etchings, postage stamps, susceptible girls.”

  A couple of weeks after Dr. Broom heard about the Taungs skull he came marching into Dart’s laboratory unannounced, ignored everybody, strode to the bench on which the skull rested, and dropped to his knees. He remained for the weekend as Dart’s houseguest and spent almost the entire time inspecting Australopithecus. He agreed that it was an intermediate form of life.

  Because of Dr. Broom’s reputation the skull became famous, so famous that witty young men would ask: “Who was that girl I saw you with last night? —is she from Taungs?”

  But along with the simpletons, as usually happens, a few intelligent people spoke up. An editorial in the London Observer concluded with these lines:

  There must needs be some who will say that the discovery of a damaged skull in subtropical Africa makes no difference. Admittedly it does not affect us materially like the discovery of wireless or electric light. The difference is in outlook. The stimulus to all progress is man’s innate belief that he can grasp the scheme of things or his place therein. But this stimulus compels him to track his career backward to its first beginnings as well as to carry it forward to its ultimate end. The more clearly he sees whence he has come the more clearly he will discern whither he is bound. Hence it is not an accident that an age of immense scientific advance produced Darwin with his Theory of Origins, or that a later period of social unrest has stimulated archaeologists to reveal the strength of the social tradition. Viewed in some such intellectual context as this, the Taungs skull is at once a reminder of limitations and an encouragement to further endeavour. Its importance, significant in itself, is enhanced by the fact that its message has been preserved through unimaginable ages for discovery here and now.

  The Observer’s thoughtful opinion did not convince everybody. Letters from around the world arrived at Dart’s office, warning him vociferously, emphatically, with magisterial certainty, that he would roast in Hell. The London Times printed a sharp rebuke, addressed to Dart, from a woman who signed herself “Plain but Sane”:

  “How can you, with such a wonderful gift of God-given genius—not the gift of a monkey, but a trust from the Almighty—become a traitor to your Creator by making yourself the active agent of Satan and his ready tool? What does your Master pay you for trying to undermine God’s word? . . . What will it profit you? The wages of the master you serve is death. Why not change over? What will evolution do for you when dissolution overtakes you?”

  And, regardless of evolution or dissolution, Profit was much on the mind of a gentleman who owned property in Sterkfontein, northeast of Taungs, for he issued a pamphlet with this invitation:

  “Come to Sterkfontein and find the missing link!”

  Given any conversation about men, apes, evolution, and all that, somebody inevitably will use the phrase missing link, often as a derisive question: “Why can’t they find it?” —followed by hostile laughter. The unmistakable inference being that the link can’t be found because it never existed, which proves that Archbishop Ussher must have been right. Oh, not 4004 B.C. exactly, but 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 rid of the taste of rhino urine,” he said, “even after filtering the water through charcoal and boiling it and using it in tea with lemon.”

  He sounds like the natural descendant of those nineteenth-century British explorers, men and women both, who marched presumptuously in when common sense should have kept them out. Eighty years ago one of his aunts arrived at Mombasa with the idea of touring the continental interior. Local officials, aghast at such madness, told her to go home; instead, she took a firm grip on her umbrella, hired a string of porters, and walked to Uganda. No doubt she approved of a nephew who chose to spend his life associating with dangerous animals and fever-laden mosquitos in the serene conviction that none of them would dare interrupt his work.

  Leakey’s first diamond in the rough was, as we might expect, a chunk of somebody’s skull. It looked human—if compared to Dart’s semihuman Australopithecus—and was about 750,000 years old. This, as professionals say, hardened the evidence that the African evolutionary line had continued. Leakey’s man fitted nicely between ourselves and Dart’s bone-wielding cannibalistic baboon killers.

  Between 1961 and 1964 the Leakeys uncovered some two-million-year-old bones. The skulls indicated a large brain and the reconstructed hands looked altogether human. But we have trouble granting the existence of humans two million years ago—humans of any sort—not to mention those who may have been sophisticated enough to invent a device still used by various people around the world. By Argentine cowboys, for example, and by Eskimos who use it to capture geese and ptarmigan. That is, the bola. For there is evidence in the form of stone spheres from Bed II at Olduvai that those people used bolas to hunt animals. The spheres, which have been deliberately worked, are the size of baseballs. They might have been nothing more than hammers or clubheads, or balls meant to be thrown individually, though it would be strange to spend so much time shaping an object that could be lost. The reason Leakey suspected they were bolas—the stones encased in hide and connected by thongs—is that they often are found in pairs, or in sets of three.

  It’s a bit staggering to think that bolas may have been whirling across the earth for two million years.

  A number of occupied sites have been located. At one of them the debris forms a curious pattern: a dense concentration within a rectangular area fifteen feet long by thirty feet wide. Outside this rectangle practically nothing can be found for three or four feet in any direction. The ground is bare. Then, beyond this vacant area, the artifacts show up again, though not as many. The explanation is simple. The littered rectangle was their home, surrounded by a protective thorn fence. Trash was tossed over the fence.

  At another site there is a ring, about fifteen feet in diameter, consisting of several hundred stones. Occasionally the stones form a mound. The Okombambi tribe constructs shelters like this. For two million years they’ve been doing it. The mounds of rock support upright poles over which grass mats or hides are stretched to break the wind.

  So the chronicle of humanity continues to lengthen. Now and again this record is frankly reassuring. In 1966 on the French Riviera, while a hillside was being excavated to make way for some luxurious apartments, the site of an ancient encampment was revealed. And there, 400,000 years old, lay a human footprint. It tells as much as anything. The footprint proves that we have tenure on earth as certainly as the whale and the crocodile. We, too, have taken part in the grand scheme.

  Flipper-bearing lungfish moved ashore in East Africa—in East Africa or some other warm forest-clad land—where they turned into tree shrews which turned into apes. Then, fifteen or twenty million years ago, presumably when forests were dwindling because of a change in climate, some adventurous or desperate apes moved from the trees to the savannas. Here, anxious t
o see what was happening, because it could mean life or death, they spent most of their time upright.

  And on the plain, unprotected, they learned the value of tools and the use of fire.

  After that it was downhill all the way, or uphill—depending on your estimate of mankind—from omnivorous thighbone-wielding assassins to those erect Ice Age people with whom we can sympathize, who felt a previously unknown need to worship, to make music, to dance, and paint pictures.

  Evidence that our Ice Age ancestors could appreciate music is tentative, unlike the vividly painted animals that register their love of graphic art, yet what seems to be a musical instrument still exists in southern France. In a cave at Pêche Merle a set of stalactites appears to have been worn down unnaturally, and when struck with a chamois-covered stick each column produces a different note. Ascribe this to chance or not, as you like.

  At Le Tuc d’Audoubert, half a mile inside the cave, a pair of bison were modeled in high relief on a clay bank—the bull ready to mount the cow. The clay is now dry and deeply cracked, otherwise the animals seem unaffected by the millennia that have passed since they were formed. They surge with vitality. But the arresting thing about this tableau is not the elemental vigor of the bison or the skill with which they have been realized; more startling is the fact that the mud floor of the cave shows a ring of little heelprints, as though children had been dancing. In other words, these two animals were the central images of a ritual, a bison dance. And it is possible that the young dancers wore bison horns and pelts, just as in the eagle dance American Indians wear eagle feathers and represent themselves as eagles, circling, sweeping, fluttering.

  Prehistorians agree that this grotto was the scene of a ritual, though some of them are not sure about the dancing; they favor a kind of backward march, a goose step in reverse, which is such an ugly concept that it may well be correct. Neither theory has been certified, however, so let’s assume the children were dancing.