A HISTORY OF THE GREAT ZIMBABWE MYSTERY

In 1953 a hundred anthropologists from several continents gathered to attend the Quadrennial Pan-African Congress in Prehistory at Livingstone. Raymond A Dart was there. With him his heavy boxes of fossil bones that he and his students had collected and carefully developed, along with anatomical analyses and statistical distributions. His conclusion and argument was that Australopithecus africanus had gone armed, and that among his Makapan fossils were the world's first known weapons.

In a sense, Dart was facing an international court of scientific opinion. It was a court, the verdicts of which, stood beyond appeal. The judges would not return to the African circuit for another four years. It was science's supreme court on the subject of man, meeting at a time when the creation of the ultimate weapon was in progress, threatening mankind with possible extinction.
The court accorded Dart twenty minutes to present his grave evidence, and received his argument in silence. It failed generally to inspect his exhibit, then rendered a verdict that the bones were the work of hyenas.

Ultimately, Dart was proved right, of course and, ironically, by the Chairman of that meeting, the great L.S.B. Leakey himself, after his wife, Mary Leakey, discovered in Olduvai Gorge, that an australopithecine had been the author of our human culture. Great emphasis was made though, that the crude pebble-tools found were not weapons. Considering man's devotion to military activities and weapons of mass destruction, it is astonishing that the romantic fallacy still persists. Common sense alone tells us that early man did not make tools simply to upgrade his cave. He made them so he could fashion a weapon to protect it - and himself - from wild animals, such as leopards and baboons. The vigorous use of the humerus bone of an antelope proved useful for crushing the skull of a baboon, and in general was a handy substitute for canine teeth, claws, horns, tusks and hooves. Making and using weapons is part of our DNA.

Writing in African Genesis about the Livingstone verdict, Robert Ardrey stated that a scientist has the right to be wrong. 'It is a right approximating an obligation, for if a scientist becomes more concerned with being right than with expressing the convictions of his judgment, then he violates a public trust'.

The problem with the Livingstone congress though, Ardrey said, was not that its chairman possessed a set of preconceived views - which by a stroke of irony he himself would one day help shatter - it was rather that an entire body of scientific opinion, confronted by evidence disturbing the premises of its field and challenging all fashionable conclusions concerning the nature of man, chose to hide itself behind the hyena alibi. Or, as Ardrey put it more succinctly, 'created a bag of fluff in which to hide its head.'

The folly and prejudice of the hyena theory and its proponents was not isolated to anthropology. Archaeology has had more than its share, and Great Zimbabwe is the perfect example of archaeologists wanting to believe one theory, and not wanting to believe an opposing one, despite the evidence. In other words, creating a bag of fluff in which to hide its head.

It was not a panel of a hundred-odd archaeologists from several countries though, who visited Rhodesia in 1905 it was only one man: David Randall-MacIver, at the request of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He came, he saw, and he wrote a book on the subject, all in the space of a year, declaring unequivocally that Great Zimbabwe was the work of the Bantu.

MacIver was followed by Gertrude Caton-Thomson in 1929, sent out by the same British Association. Her findings, gathered in even less time than MacIver’s, more or less confirmed his view, thereby firmly establishing the Bantu theory in virtual concrete. Between them, in less than two years of investigation, they managed not only to not advance science one iota, but to actually regress it