Word: sterkfontein
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week, world-famous anthropologists at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science listened with shock and bewilderment to the description of the anthropoid ape fossil which Dr. Robert Broom of the Transvaal Museum discovered in the South African Sterkfontein caves last fall. The ape, of the family Australopithecus transvaalensis, lived in the Pleistocene days, when Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus were already beating down lesser men. Since South Africa was treeless, Australopithecus must have walked on the ground. Whether it walked human-fashion is not known, since the bones of the lower leg have not been...
...those who agreed with Professor Dart from the first in placing Australopihecus "in or near the line by which man las arisen" was Dr. Robert Broom, paleontologist of the Transvaal Museum in retoria. Last July another blast in another limestone quarry, this time at Sterkfontein, turned up another fossil brain case. The manager, urged by Dr. Broom to keep his eyes peeled for a Taungs ape, landed this to the scientist. Feverish earch disclosed the upper face, the skull base, the right jawbone with three teeth, a detached molar. Last week in Nature appeared a letter from Dr. Broom describing...
...Broom's joy the Sterkfontein skull was that of an adult, with fairly heavy brow ridges and a brain capacity of about 600 cc. He found some resemblances to the Taungs skull and some differences, therefore put his fossil in the same genus with Australopithecus but in a different species. Name: Australopithecus transvaalensis Broom. One molar which he was able to examine closely showed close affinities to Dryopithecus, a well-known genus of extinct apes. It is from a generalized type of Dryopithecus that most anthropologists believe man evolved...
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