Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [17]
When the skull was reconstructed, the Kromdraai fossil turned out to be different from the Sterkfontein specimen. Its face was flatter, its jaw was more powerful and its teeth were larger. Broom therefore decided to allocate it to yet another genus and species, calling it Paranthropus robustus—‘robust creature next to man’.
Once again, he was swift to send accounts to Nature and to Illustrated London News. The Illustrated London News acclaimed the new find under the headline: ‘The Missing Link No Longer Missing’. The scientific establishment in Britain, however, remained sceptical. He was criticised for creating new genera on ‘extremely slender grounds’ and told to act with greater caution. ‘The English are not accustomed to such daring’, observed Broom.
But scientific opinion in the United States was beginning to turn. In June 1938, two influential scientists, William King Gregory and Milo Hellman of the American Museum of Natural History, arrived in South Africa to examine the original specimens from Taung and Sterkfontein. Gregory had previously dismissed the Taung child as no more than an ape. The two Americans now concluded that the specimens were ‘in both a structural and a genetic sense the conservative cousins of the contemporary human branch’. At a meeting of the Associated Scientific and Technical Societies of South Africa in July 1938, they paid tribute to Dart and Broom. ‘The whole world is indebted to these two men for their discoveries, which have reached the climax of more than a century of research on that great problem, the origin and physical structure of man’. The following year they placed all three specimens—Australopithecus, Plesianthropus and Paranthropus—within the same subfamily, Australopithecinae, of the family Hominidae. But many other American scientists remained sceptical.
During the war years, Broom compiled all the evidence about the fossils found at Taung, Sterkfontein and Kromdraai in a comprehensive volume entitled The South African Fossil Ape-Men: The Australopithecinae . It was published in 1946, shortly after his eightieth birthday. Broom concluded that australopithecines resembled humans in several ways. ‘They were almost certainly bipedal and they probably used their hands for the manipulation of implements’. Although they had small brains and apelike faces, their teeth were similar. ‘What appears certain is that the group, if not quite worthy of being called men, were nearly men, and were closely allied to mankind, and not at all nearly related to the living anthropoids’. Altogether, wrote Broom, ‘if one could be found alive today I think it probable that most scientists would regard him as a primitive form of man’.
Broom was given an award by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences for producing the year’s most important biological book. Although critics in England accused Broom of being too ambitious and too hasty in reaching his conclusions, even there the tide of opinion began to turn. At the end of 1946, an influential Oxford anatomist, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, spent two weeks in South Africa poring over the fossils and visiting cave sites. He arrived, he recalled, as the ‘devil’s advocate’, bent on opposing Broom’s claims, but was soon convinced that he was right.
When scientists gathered for the first Pan-African Congress on Prehistory in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, in January 1947, the South African fossil finds were consequently the centre of attention. Dart and Broom were invited to give a presentation of their work. Le Gros Clark followed, throwing his weight behind them. ‘I am afraid there