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Osteodontokeratic culture
The Osteodontokeratic ("bone-tooth-horn", Greek and Latin derivation) culture (ODK) is a hypothesis that was developed by Prof. Raymond Dart (who identified the Taung child fossil in 1924, and published the find in ''Nature'' Magazine in 1925),〔Dart, R. A. 1924. "Australopithecus africanus: The man-ape of South Africa". ''Nature'' 115: 195-199.〕 which detailed the predatory habits of Australopith species in South Africa involving the manufacture and use of osseous implements. Dart envisaged ''Australopithecus africanus'', known from Taung and Sterkfontein caves, and ''Australopithecus prometheus'' (now classified as ''Au. africanus'') from Makapansgat, as carnivorous, cannibalistic predators who utilized bone and horn implements to hunt various animals, such as antelopes and primates, as well as other Australopiths.
==History==
In 1947, Wilfred Eitzman, a local schoolteacher, visited the Makapansgat Limeworks in Limpopo, South Africa, where he collected a number of fossil remains, including those of extinct baboon species, which originated from the Australopith-bearing, Member 3 Grey breccia layers. Eitzman promptly sent some of this fossil material to Prof. Raymond Dart at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for thorough inspection. Dart examined 58 baboon skulls from Eitzman's collections, and recognized a repeated pattern of depressed fractures on the cranial vaults of a number these specimens. Consistent with this pattern, he also found that 4 out of the 6 known Australopith skulls from the Member 3 layers showed similar cranial fractures, although Dart struggled to find an adequate explanation that would account for the frequency of this damage. Eventually Dart concluded that this pattern could have only resulted from “purposeful violence…inflicted by implements held in the hands,” suggesting that southern African Australopiths used long bones (e.g. femurs and humeri), mandibles, horn cores, etc. as hunting weaponry to satisfy their hyper-carnivorous diets (1949).〔Dart, R. A. 1949. The predatory implement technique of the Australopithecines. ''American Journal of Physical Anthropology'' 7: 1-16.〕 Thus, the ODK hypothesis implied that the rise of the ''Australopithecus'' genus from 'hominoid' to 'hominin,' meaning from an ‘ape-adaptive grade’ to a more ‘human-adaptive grade,’ was borne from the ability of early hominin species to use tools, more specifically weapons.
Dart published numerous journal articles on the subject of the ODK hypothesis, which received considerable backlash from his contemporaries. In 1957, he released a comprehensive volume entitled, ''The Osteodontokeratic Culture of Australopithecus prometheus''〔Dart, R. A. 1957. ''The Osteodontokeratic Culture of Australopithecus prometheus''. Transvaal Museum Memoir No. 10.〕 which outlined his arguments for the validity of the "predatory transition from Ape to Man" (see Dart 1953).〔Dart, R. A. 1953. The predatory transition from Ape to Man. ''International Anthropological and Linguistic Review'' 1: 201-219.〕 To justify his arguments, Dart relied on critical lines of evidence that substantiated the validity of ODK culture, although his critics would eventually turn his evidence against him to refute the hypothesis altogether (see below). Dart suggested that the breakage patterns of the so-called bone implements from the Member 3 Grey breccia layers from Makapansgat displayed evidence of being purposefully broken by the early Australopiths, through cracking and twisting, while fresh. Dart's opinion was that this damage was in no way characteristic of predatory or scavenging animals (e.g. hyenas), and so must have been the result of early hominin dietary activities, mostly likely to access marrow. Furthermore, after the analysis of over 7,000 faunal remains from the Member 3 Grey breccia material, Dart found a statistical over-representation of certain skeletal elements, such as distal humeri, metapodial bones and mandibles. He concluded that such skewed representational patterns could have only resulted from the selection and transportation of fleshy carcass parts of animals into the Makapansgat cave system by Australopiths. Lastly, Dart assigned specific tool uses to different bones elements, e.g. a 'mace' for antelope humeri, etc., similar to the manner in which Mary Leakey created tool types to account for various core morphologies in the Oldowan assemblages at Olduvai Gorge.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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