Robert Broom Biography

Born in poverty in Scotland, Robert Broom went on to become a respected physician and renowned paleontologist who made important fossil discoveries as to the possible ancestors of human beings. Broom received his M.D. from the University of Glasgow, but it was during a trip to Australia in 1892 that he found his true calling as a paleontologist. After moving to South Africa in 1897, Broom joined the faculty at the University of Stellenbosch. However, he lost this position at the conservative religious institution because of his belief in the theory of evolution. Although he the worked as a physician, he devoted all his spare time to fossil hunting, conducting excavations staffed largely by volunteers who were attracted to his roguish personality. (Broom always wore a dark formal suit even while hunting for fossils, stripping naked when he got hot.)

Broom did his most notable work after reaching the age of 68 when he left medical practice to work at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, South Africa. Over the next few years, he made a succession of spectacular discoveries. Broom was convinced that an ape-like mammal (the Taung child) discovered by Raymond Dart in 1924 and named Australopithecine, was a hominid that walked erect like homo sapiens, the human beings of today. Intent on finding an adult Australopithecine to confirm Dart's findings, Broom found a fragmentary skull in the mid-1930s of just such an adult at Sterkfontein, which was eventually classified into the genus Australopithecus africanus.In 1947, Broom found a complete adult specimen estimated to be approximately 2.5 million years old. Broom's discovery, which remains the world's most complete specimen of Australopithecus africanus, was called "Mrs. Ples." The name stems from Broom's initial description of the hominid as Plesianthropus,meaning almost man. In 1995, however, Mrs. Ples was renamed Mr. Ples after a reanalysis determined its sex was male.

In 1937, a young school-boy volunteering with Broom's expedition, Gert Terblanche, found the first specimen of Australopithecus robustus at Kromdraai, South Africa. This was Broom's most famous discovery. Estimated to have lived in southern Africa between 1.2-2 million years ago, this stockier form of Australopithecine had massive jaws and muscles that allowed it to chew the tough fruits and plants indigenous at that time. Broom also performed excavations at Swartkrans in 1948, unearthing fossils that were eventually connected to Homo erectus, one of the first hominids to migrate from Africa and adapt to both temperate and arctic climates.

Broom spent the remainder of his career exploring sites throughout South Africa and interpreting the early hominid remains that he had discovered. His book Finding the Missing Link was published in 1950, the year before he died. According to one account, Broom died only moments after writing the last lines of a monograph on the Australopithecines. His final words were, "Now that's finished...and so am I." Mr. Ples and many of Broom's other findings are housed at the Transvaal Museum.