Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [18]
Relishing the attention, Broom impressed all with his boundless enthusiasm. During an excursion to a rock art site near Kisese, he ignored a plea from the Kenyan archaeologist Louis Leakey to forgo the two-mile walk to the cave paintings in the blazing summer sun. Leakey wrote: ‘I shall never forget the sight of Robert Broom ... wearing, as always, a dark suit, wing collar and butterfly tie, negotiating the last steep stretch in the heat of the day. It was indeed an amazing feat for a man of his age in such unsuitable clothing’. When the visitors were obliged to cross a river in flood on foot, it was Broom who led the way, with his black trousers rolled up to his knees.
The 1947 Congress was not only a personal triumph for Dart and Broom. It marked the point at which scientific opinion began to consider Africa rather than Asia as the more likely birthplace of humankind. Buoyed up by their discussions, delegates resolved to hold conferences on African prehistory on a regular basis every four years, accepting an invitation from South Africa’s prime minister, Jan Smuts, to meet in South Africa in 1951.
On his return to South Africa, Broom threw himself with gusto into the hunt for more fossils, helped by a talented young assistant, John Robinson. Smuts promised to provide him with government funds. But Broom was soon embroiled in further controversy. His colleagues became increasingly concerned about his slapdash methods of recording his work. A Cambridge-trained archaeologist, Basil Cooke, recalled how in 1947 he and a colleague visiting the Transvaal Museum asked Broom if they could see the Kromdraai skull. ‘Broom fossicked in a drawer and pulled out the facial part, then rushed off down the corridor, with us on his trail, and into the laboratory of Vivien Fitzsimmons. There he pushed aside two jars of snakes and said: “Here’s the other piece. I knew it must be there”’.
There was also alarm about Broom’s methods in the field, in particular his liberal use of dynamite to blast fossils from rock-hard breccia. Geologists complained that indiscriminate dynamiting destroyed the stratigraphic context of the fossils, making it difficult if not impossible to try to date them. To Broom’s fury, the Historical Monuments Commission intervened, insisting that Broom would not be allowed to continue his work unless he was assisted by a ‘competent field geologist’.
Always ready for a fight, Broom refused to comply. ‘I regarded it as an insult’, he recalled. ‘I had no compunction whatever about breaking the law. I considered that a bad law ought to be deliberately broken’. He appealed to Smuts for support and carried on blasting at Sterkfontein.
He was soon vindicated. On 18 April 1947, as the smoke from blasting drifted away, Broom recovered what he described as ‘the most important fossil skull ever found in the world’s history’. The blast had split the skull into two fragments but had not damaged it irreparably. It was complete but for the teeth and the lower jaw. ‘I have seen so many interesting sights in my long life’, Broom recalled, ‘but this was the most thrilling in my experience’.
The skull was clearly that of an adult australopithecine—an adult version of the Taung child. After thorough inspection, Broom believed it to have belonged to a middle-aged female. He labelled it Plesianthropus africanus. But it became more