Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [16]
Then, at the age of sixty-eight, he decided to embark on a new career. Having become the greatest palaeontologist who had ever lived, he remarked, he saw no reason he should not become the greatest palaeoanthropologist as well.
Broom’s aim was to find an adult Taung ‘ape’ to prove that australopithecines were in the direct line of human ancestors. Two of Dart’s students drew his attention to a huge underground cave at Sterkfontein, forty miles west of Johannesburg. The cave had been discovered in the 1890s during blasting operations at a limestone quarry. A visitor in 1898 recorded that its entrance was as grand as ‘the hall of a mansion’. Inside, he wrote, ‘Thousands of stalactites of different shapes and sizes hang above one’s head. Several have long since become joined to stalagmites and form magnificent pillars’. Later in the 1920s, with public interest in such sites stimulated by the discovery of the Taung child in 1924, the Sterkfontein cave had attracted a growing number of tourists and souvenir hunters. An enterprising local store-owner who traded in bat guano from the caves had written a brief guide to the site, urging readers to ‘Come to Sterkfontein and buy your guano, and find the missing link’. But no serious scientific work had ever been carried out there.
Accompanied by Dart’s students, Broom arrived at Sterkfontein on 9 August 1936, dressed, as ever, in a dark three-piece suit and wing collar. By coincidence, the quarry supervisor at Sterkfontein, George Barlow, had been the manager at Taung when the first australopithecine had been found. He still took an interest in fossils, selling them from a tea-room to visitors. Broom asked him whether he had seen anything at Sterkfontein like the Taung skull, and Barlow replied that he thought that he had. Broom asked him to keep a lookout for any promising specimens.
Three days later, when Broom returned, Barlow handed him three baboon skulls and part of a sabre-toothed cat skull. When he returned again on 17 August, Barlow showed him a far more significant find: a fossilised brain-cast. It had been blasted out that morning. ‘Is this what you’re after?’ asked Barlow.
Broom scoured the blasted area for other parts, but with no success. The following day, however, he returned with a museum team and found the base of the skull and a number of bone fragments. After several weeks of work, he managed to assemble a rather battered and incomplete skull of what seemed to be an Australopithecus. He placed the find in a new species, calling it Australopithecus transvaalensis, but later decided, because of differences he perceived between the teeth of the Taung and the Sterkfontein specimens, to move it into a new genus, calling it Plesianthropus transvaalensis—‘near man of the Transvaal’.
Like Dart, he lost no time in publicising his find, sending accounts to Nature and to Illustrated London News, insisting it confirmed Dart’s views. The Illustrated London News ran a summary of his article in September under the heading: ‘A new Ancestral Link between Ape and Man’. But the scientific establishment still preferred to regard Asia rather than Africa as the birthplace of mankind.
Two years later, Broom made another breakthrough. In June 1938, Barlow handed him what appeared to be an australopithecine palate with one molar still in place. It had been given to Barlow by a fifteenyear-old schoolboy, Gert Terblanche, who had found it on a hillside on a neighbouring farm called Kromdraai, a mile from the Sterkfontein site. Broom immediately set out to investigate and tracked down Gert at his school. Summoned by the headmaster, Gert produced from his trouser pocket what Broom described as ‘four of the most wonderful teeth ever seen in the world