The need for this book has arisen from the listing as a World Heritage Site of the Fossil Hominid Sites of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai and the Environs – popularly though not entirely accurately called the ‘Cradle of Humankind’! The World Heritage Centre falls under UNESCO, that is, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. So, to understand the roots of this book, it is necessary to explore South Africa's relations with UNESCO and the events leading up to the listing of this country's first World Heritage Site in 1999.

Although South Africa was a founder member of UNESCO in 1946, it saw fit to withdraw from the Organisation in 1956, when the apartheid policies of the Union government were rising to a crescendo of racial intolerance and discrimination. With the perspective of hindsight, there is no doubt that it was UNESCO's vigorous programme against racism that was the cardinal factor in South Africa's decision to withdraw from the Organisation. A resolution adopted at the Fourth General Conference of UNESCO in 1949 called on the director-general, Dr Jaime Torres-Bodet, an esteemed Mexican poet, to (1) collect scientific materials concerning problems of race; (2) give wide diffusion to the scientific information collected; and (3) prepare an educational campaign based on this information. UNESCO in its early years embarked on the preparation of two sets of important publications, The Race Question in Modern Science and The Race Question in Modern Thought. Collectively these books constituted a scholarly and powerful indictment of racism (or racialism, as it was then still called). They were published less than a decade after the horrors that had been perpetrated during the Second World War in the name of race.

Torres-Bodet convened a Committee of Experts on Race Problems. These individuals were drawn from the fields of physical anthropology, sociology, social psychology and ethnology. Their deliberations led to the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race (Paris, July 1950). This First Statement on Race opened with the ringing affirmation: ‘Scientists have reached general agreement in recognising that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species,Homo sapiens.’

The story of the discovery of the Sterkfontein fossils begins in 1895. In that year Hans Paul Thomasset began quarrying for lime in the Sterkfontein area and especially in the Sterkfontein cave (Fig. 13.1).

About the same time, two other personalities with well-known names appeared on the scene. One was David Draper and the other Guglielmo Martinaglia; Draper's historical link was with the Kromdraai caves and Martinaglia's was with the Sterkfontein caves.

Early in the 1890s, Draper was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, the first South African-born Fellow to be elected to that distinguished Society. Draper contributed a number of papers to the London Society. At the same time he realised the need for a local Society. Largely as a result of his efforts, coupled with those of Dr Hugh Exton, there was formed in 1895 the Geological Society of South Africa. At its inaugural meeting in February 1895, Draper was elected its first secretary and treasurer.

At the first ordinary meeting of the new Society, held on 8 April 1895, Draper made the following important contribution to the discussion:

On 1 February 1895, Draper sent a box of bone-bearing breccia from Kromdraai to the British Museum of Natural History in South Kensington, London. The box of bones was accompanied by a letter dated 1 February 1895, part of which read:

Abstract

Many scholars have sought to relate the findings and interpretations of archaeology to the evolution of the brain and mind. In effect, such studies venture a statement that the techniques and symbols explicit and implicit in the archaeological record are related, more or less directly, to the cognitive abilities, mental competences and intelligences of evolving hominins, ancient and modern. It has however been evident for some time that it is not only from the archaeological record that we may glean evidence on the evolution of hominin intelligence. The size and form of endocranial casts of fossil hominins have added grist to the mill of those probing the evolution of hominin cerebration. The analogy and in a hopeful mood the homology between the brains and behaviours of human and non-human primates, and those inferred for our remote ancestors, have provided new pointers in the analysis of culture. Indeed they question the validity of the very concept of culture, as understood during most of the twentieth century. Ethological studies have shown some close resemblances between human and ape behaviours. Just over fifty years ago, the apparently human preserve of tool-using and tool-making led Kenneth Oakley to speak of Man the Tool-Maker, while he could write ‘… it is evident that man may be distinguished as the tool-making primate …’. Yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, Jane Goodall, Frédéric Joulian, William McGrew and C. and H. Boesch cast a flood of new light on the implemental activities of wild chimpanzees, just as H. Khroustov, in Moscow, did for chimpanzees in captivity in the early 1960s. Joulian went on to contest the longcherished paradigm that ‘culture’ is an exclusively human realm. The pursuit by various groups of West African chimpanzees of nut-cracking in some populations, but not in others of the same species, strongly suggested that such behavioural traits were transmitted by epigenetic means. In a word, they were learned behaviour of a kind which, conventionally, has been assigned to human cultural behaviour. Based on our analysis of H. habilis endocasts and on a review of the inferred cultural and social aspects of this hominin, it is argued here that H. habilis was able to speak.

Résumé

Nombre de scientifiques ont cherché à rattacher découvertes et interprétations archéologiques à l’évolution du cerveau et de l'intellect.

This Round Table is a celebration of Franco–South African collaboration in the fields of palaeoanthropology and archaeology. In this cooperative endeavour, we who pursue our lives and researches in South Africa have been at the receiving end of extraordinary largesse from France, mediated with sagacity and imagination by the Embassy of France in South Africa and the CNRS. This conference is the latest manifestation of this fruitful inter-hemispheric interaction. It is our hope that the research opportunities and facilities which South Africa is able to offer in abundance and the ‘Open House’ policy towards visiting researchers and students which we have pursued for nearly half a century may effect a certain symmetry in this relationship.

It is symbolic of this cross-pollination that this symposium has been organised by a French scientist, Francesco d'Errico, and a South African one, Lucinda Backwell. For their combined efforts, coupled with their manifest organisational skills, we who participated in the meeting are deeply indebted. To them and their helpers, a sincere expression of thanks is due.

Personally, I convey my gratitude to the organisers for their very kind thought in dedicating the Round Table to myself, a most touching and generous gesture which I deeply appreciate.

A fitting time was chosen for the holding of this conference: worthy of celebration is the fact that fifty years ago Francis Crick and James Watson published their historic paper announcing the double helix model for the structure of DNA; another cause of rejoicing is the award of a Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for 2002 to Sydney Brenner, who obtained his first four degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand and is also a Doctor of Science honoris causa of this University. In part commemoration of both these historic events, a meeting is to be held next week, in tandem with this one, on the Human Genome in Africa, organised by Dr Wilmot James of the South African Human Sciences Research Council.

Cette Table Ronde est une célébration de la collaboration franco-sud-africaine dans les domaines de la paléoanthropologie et de l'archéologie.

It is just over a quarter of a century since Harry Jerison published the first edition of his seminal work, Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence (1973). At the time and in the decades since then, we see it as one of the most significant paleo-neurobiological landmarks which heralded the final quarter of the twentieth century. As we enter the twenty-first century, that work remains ineluctably a signpost for the coming era. It is pleasurable indeed to offer homage to Dr Jerison – who was born one day before me in what seems to have been something of an annus mirabilis, 1925 – and to offer him my thanks for his inspiration and his friendship.

When we consider the ancient hominins, one is struck by the fact of how few have yielded good natural endocranial casts (endocasts).