Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [19]
While the discovery of Mrs Ples was acclaimed in Europe and the United States, members of the Historical Monuments Commission were enraged that Broom had so brazenly defied their ruling about the use of dynamite and banned him from the Sterkfontein site. But after a period of public ridicule, they were obliged to relent.
Broom’s spectacular run of luck at Sterkfontein continued throughout 1947. In August, he blasted out a chunk of breccia containing two sides of a pelvis, mostly intact, providing crucial evidence that australopithecines had been able to walk upright. Together with John Robinson, he opened up a new excavation site at Swartkrans, a disused lime quarry across the valley from Sterkfontein, making further discoveries, including a nearly complete mandible that he named Telanthropus capensis.
Even diehard critics were impressed. In a letter to Nature in 1947, Sir Arthur Keith conceded: ‘I am now convinced on the evidence submitted by Dr. Robert Broom that Professor Dart was right and I was wrong’. The following year, in a book entitled A New Theory of Human Evolution, Keith agreed that ‘of all the fossil forms known to us, the Australopithecinae are the nearest akin to man and the most likely to stand in direct line of man’s ascent’.
In his final years, Broom endeavoured to make clearer sense of the mass of evidence he had accumulated. Despite his penchant for pinning different names to his collection of fossils, he nevertheless assigned them to a single subfamily, the Australopithecinae. Two main species had emerged: the lightly built ‘gracile’ Australopithecus africanus, which included the Taung child and Mrs Ples; and the ‘robust’ australopithecines like Paranthropus (later renamed Australopithecus robustus). Both walked upright; both possessed relatively small brains; both had teeth that were humanlike. Although the age of cave fossils was difficult to determine, it seemed likely that africanus predated and was ancestral to robustus. It also seemed likely that africanus was the ancestor of the line that led to Homo sapiens.
By the time he died on 6 April 1951, at the age of eighty-four, Broom had transformed the study of palaeoanthropology. Australopithecines, henceforth, became a recognised landmark on the path of human evolution. Moreover, by identifying two types of australopithecines of similar appearance, Broom had opened up an entirely new prospect.
‘Since one of the two ape-men seemed clearly to be on the line of human descent and the other to have specialised away from that line’, wrote Phillip Tobias, a distinguished South African scientist from the next generation, ‘Broom’s finds compelled scholars to realise that not all early hominids were direct ancestors of modern mankind. Some were on side branches. This meant that at an earlier period the two species, so closely related to each other, must have branched off from a common ancestor. The pattern of hominid evolution was not like a linear Chain of Being after all. It was like a bush of branches, only one of which made the grade to the later stages of human evolution, while other branches were doomed to ultimate extinction’.
But just when South Africa seemed to be leading the world in the search for human origins, a dark age settled over the country. In 1948, Afrikaner Nationalists gained power, determined to enforce white supremacy under a system of apartheid and hostile to any notion that whites and blacks might have shared a common humanity. The new National Party government held that blacks were an inferior race, destined by the will of God to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and quoted texts from the Bible as proof. Nationalist politicians scorned the notion that humankind could have descended from an ancient African ape and promoted the teaching of creationist views. State schools were barred from teaching evolutionary theory. When the government gave notice that it would not allow black