Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [15]
Then in February 1925 came news of the discovery of the Taung child.
Broom’s immediate reaction was to send Dart a letter of congratulations. Two weeks later, without any prior arrangement, he suddenly arrived at Dart’s laboratory in Johannesburg. Although Dart knew of Broom’s work, the two men had never previously met. To Dart’s surprise, Broom walked straight past him and other members of his staff, strode over to the bench where the Taung fossil had been placed and dropped to his knees to examine it more closely. Looking up at Dart over his spectacles with a quizzical smile, he said: ‘I am kneeling in adoration of our ancestor’.
Broom spent the weekend at Dart’s home examining the skull carefully, becoming all the more certain of its rightful place in human ancestry. ‘As a palaeontologist I did not greatly worry about the size and shape of the brain or the convolutions’, he wrote, ‘but I was convinced from the structure of the teeth that the [Taung] child was not allied to either the chimpanzee or the gorilla, and that it was closely allied to man’.
Having satisfied himself about Dart’s claims, he sent an article to Nature in London and to Natural History in New York supporting him. ‘We have a connecting link between the higher apes and one of the lowest human types’, he wrote. And he told a Cape Times correspondent: ‘The skull is probably the most important ancestral human skull found. In fact, I regard it as the most important fossil ever discovered’.
Like Dart, he was shocked by the reaction of the British scientific establishment. Writing his memoirs twenty-five years later, he was still incandescent:
In England, many took little interest in the discovery of what might be a being closely related to man’s ancestors, but they were greatly interested in the pedantic question of whether the name Australopithecus was good Latin! Prof. Dart might or might not be a great anatomist, but they were sure he was not a great classical scholar. As if it mattered in the least!
He recalled how a prominent scientist at the British Museum, F. A. Bather, had scolded Dart in the columns of Nature: ‘If you want to join in a game, you must learn the rules’, Bather had said. ‘Professor Dart does not yet realize the many sidedness of his offences’. Broom fumed:
It makes one rub one’s eyes. Here was a man who had made one of the greatest discoveries in the world’s history—a discovery that may yet rank in importance with Darwin’s Origin of Species; and English culture treats him as if he had been a naughty schoolboy.
And he added caustically:
I was never able to discover what were Prof. Dart’s offences. Presumably the most serious was that when he found a very important skull he did not immediately send it off to the British Museum, where it would have been examined by an ‘expert’, and probably described ten years later, but boldly described it himself, and published an account within a few weeks of the discovery.
The outcome, Broom said, had been disastrous. ‘Our wonderful South African “Missing Link” was discredited, and became a joke; and no one worried to look for more’.
Indeed, research work in South Africa came to a standstill for ten years.
Broom himself fell on hard times. During the Great Depression of the early 1930s, when the sheep-farming communities of the Karoo faced hardship and destitution, Broom too found it difficult to make ends meet. In 1933, he was elected president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science but was unable to afford the train fare to attend its annual conference and needed help. When Dart realised his circumstances, he appealed to General Jan Smuts, a senior government minister with a keen interest in natural history and human evolution, to rescue Broom, pointing to the waste of talent. In 1934, Broom was duly appointed Keeper of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Anthropology at the Transvaal Museum in