Ever-Populated Valley

In Nature, Professor Raymond A. Dart of Witwatersrand University tells about a valley in South Africa where humans may have lived continuously ever since humanity began. Such a place is something of a freak because the earliest humans were scarce and furtive creatures, chivied from place to place by changes of environment and predatory beasts. The remains of different types are generally scattered widely, a few bones here, a few bones there.

Professor Dart's new finds came from a cave whose mouth is now 160 ft. above the Makapan River in the Transvaal. The cave's original floor is travertine rock, on which lies more than 50 ft. of sedimentary material. In one of the layers, close to the floor, are bones of Australopithecus prometheus, a small, spry primate whom Professor Dart considers at least semi-human. Prometheus, he says, ate baboons, may have stood upright and may have possessed fire. On the other hand, apparently, he did not know how to make stone tools or weapons.

Prometheus enjoyed the cave for thousands of years, perhaps beginning 200,000 years ago. Then something happened to the cave's mouth. It may have been enlarged by a flood (the river was near then), or perhaps some earth movement directed the current against it. At any rate, the cave filled many feet deep with waterborne gravel. It was still habitable, but prometheus seems to have left.

When anthropologists studied the gravel, they found many stones in it whose sharp edges could not have been formed by random jostling in a river bed. The experts decided that at least 17 of them were primitive tools. Conclusion of the experts: some kind of toolmaking human moved into the cave soon after prometheus evacuated.

In other places in the Makapan valley traces of many later humans have come to light--from shambling Neanderthal man down to the modern Bantu. The stone tools, says Professor Dart, filled the last gap. Their discovery "may place within our grasp in a single South African valley a continuous story of human handiwork . . . from the dawn of the Pleistocene to the present day."

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