The Transvaal Fossil Human Skeleton

Abstract

AT the end of January last a road party, working in the Springbok Flats about eighty miles north of Pretoria, in excavating calcareous ground to make a road, came across a human skeleton and bones of the extinct buffalo (Bubalus Bainii) and of a large antelope. The spot where the bones were found has been visited by Mr. C. J. Swierstra of the Transvaal Museum and Mr. Herbert Lang, and they have taken careful observations of the occurrence. There is a foot and a half of dark reddish-brown surface soil, with below it about six feet of calcareous tufa (Fig. 1). The skeleton was obtained at a depth of three feet from the surface and thus about one and a half feet from the top of the tufa. The bones are for the most part much impregnated with lime and, except the powerful long bones, badly broken. The skull is mostly broken into pieces about the size of half a crown or smaller, but fortunately the mandible is well preserved. In the opinion of Mr. Lang, the man has probably been killed while hunting and his body crushed in the mud by the trampling of a wounded buffalo—not improbably the one whose bones lay near his own. Mr. Swierstra has kindly asked me to make an examination and report on these bones.