Word: transvaalers
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...There are those in the world outside," he thundered in this speech to his constituents in the Transvaal town of Heidelberg, "who believe they can bring South Africa to its knees [long pause] with a mandatory arms boycott [pause]. I tell them [long pause]they have another guess coming." The audience went wild. A National Party worker, standing 6 ft. 6 in. in his bush boots, pounded the shoulder of the spectator next to him. "Man," he shouted, "this is the man! This is the Churchill of the platteland...
Then how and when did free oxygen begin appearing in the atmosphere? A clue to the answer has been found in the incredibly old sedimentary rocks of South Africa's eastern Transvaal by Harvard's Elso Barghoorn and Andrew Knoll, now with the Oberlin College department of geology. To the naked eye, the 3.5 billion-year-old rocks Barghoorn and Knoll collected during a visit last year revealed no traces of early life. But the scientists soon uncovered the stones' secrets. Returning to Harvard with samples of the rock, the pair used a diamond cutter...
...skull of an adult Australopithecus africanus was unearthed from a mine at Sterkfontein, in the Transvaal. From it, Robert Broom reconstructed a creature similar to the one found at Taung?an ape-man somewhat more than a meter (3 ft. 3 in.) in height, with upright posture and human-like teeth but a low forehead and a small brain. Two years later Broom uncovered a new type of the southern ape a mile away, at Kromdraai. The creature, later called Australopithecus robustus, was heavier and larger than the earlier South African finds, and had bigger teeth, set in a nutcracker...
These developments, probably more than any others, hastened the differentiation between man and earlier hominids. Explains Anthropologist Charles Kimberlin ("Bob") Brain of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, South Africa: "Meat eating and hunting were important factors. If you remained a vegetarian, the necessity for culture was not nearly as great." Richard Leakey too believes that hunting helped to make emerging man a social creature. Says he: "The hominids that thrived best were those able to restrain their immediate impulses and manipulate the impulses of others into cooperative efforts. They were the vanguard of the human race...
Prime Minister John Vorster kicked off his National Party's campaign last week in what is being billed as the country's "crisis election." Looking rather like a grumpy air-raid warden, Vorster warned a rally of party faithful in the eastern Transvaal that only a National landslide on Nov. 30 could hold back the "swart gevaar" (black menace). Vorster has every reason to expect an overwhelming mandate from South Africa's 4.3 million whites. (The country's 18 million blacks, 2.5 million mixed-blood "coloreds" and 850,000 Asians cannot vote.) The latest polls indicate...