Osteodontokeratic industry

The osteodontokeratic industry is a theoretical construct of the anthropologist, Raymond Dart. He proposed that certain jagged animal bones and horns found at the Makapansgat hominid site represent pre-lithic artifacts with which Australopithecus murdered and cannibalized his fellow Australopithecines. Accordingly, Robert Ardrey based his book, African Genesis,and Arthur C. Clarke his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (directed by Stanley Kubrick), on Dart's idea of man as a killer ape advancing his species by murder.

Dart, however, influenced by WWII, used such language as "blood-bespattered", "slaughter-gutted" and "mark of Cain" (which the prisoners at Nuremberg had claimed the allies put upon them), bringing his objectivity into question. Subsequently the fractures in the bones were discovered to be post-mortem; that is, they were created by rock falls and other physical events within the cave.