Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

That the foramen magnum in the Taung specimen was located near the base of the skull, rather than the rear, did not, therefore, allow scientists to draw any conclusions about the posture of an adult Australopithecus. For that, they required an adult specimen of Australopithecus, complete with lower limbs, and no such specimen had yet been found.

Keith (1931, p. 115) concluded: “A close examination of all the features of the Taung skull—the size and configuration of the brain, the composition of the cranial walls, the features of face, the characters of jaws and teeth and the manner in which the head was hafted to the neck—leave me in no doubt as to the nature of the animal to which the skull formed part; Australopithecus was an anthropoid ape.”

As for the few humanlike characteristics of the specimen, Keith (1931, p. 53) said: “The features wherein Australopithecus departs from living African anthropoids and makes an approach towards man cannot be permitted to outweigh the predominance of its anthropoid affinities.” For Keith, the total evidence ruled out the possibility that Australopithecus was, as most modern paleoanthropologists firmly believe, a human ancestor.

11.3.3 Broom and Australopithecus

When Dart retired from the world stage, his friend Dr. Robert Broom took up the battle to establish Australopithecus as a human ancestor. From the beginning, Broom displayed keen interest in Dart’s discovery. Soon after the Taung baby made his appearance, Broom rushed to Dart’s laboratory. According to Dart (1959, p. 35): “he strode over to the bench on which the skull reposed and dropped on his knees ‘in adoration of our ancestor,’ as he put it.” British science, however, demanded an adult specimen of Australopithecus before it would kneel in adoration. Early in 1936, Broom vowed to find one.

On August 17, 1936, G. W. Barlow, the supervisor of the Sterkfontein limestone quarry, gave Broom a brain cast of an adult australopithecine. Broom (1951, p. 44) later went to the spot where the brain cast had turned up and recovered several skull fragments. From these he reconstructed the skull of Plesianthropus transvaalensis. The deposits in which the fossil was discovered are thought to be between 2.2 and 3.0 million years old (Groves 1989, p. 198).

More discoveries followed, including the lower part of a femur (TM 1513). Broom and G. W. H. Schepers (1946) described this femur as essentially human (Zuckerman 1954, p. 310). W. E. Le Gros Clark, initially skeptical of this description, later admitted that the femur “shows a resemblance to the femur of Homo which is so close as to amount to practical identity.” In 1949, W. L. Straus, Jr. (1949) said that the femur “resembles man and cercopithecid monkey in about equal degree” (Zuckerman 1954, p. 311). But according to a modern worker, the key diagnostic features of the Sterkfontein femur (TM 1513) are distinct from those of cercopithecid monkeys and African apes and are “characteristic of modern Man” (Tardieu 1981, pp. 77–79). Since the TM 1513 femur was found by itself, it is not clear that it belongs to a Plesianthropus individual. It is possible, therefore, that it could belong to a more advanced hominid, perhaps one resembling anatomically modern humans.

On June 8, 1938, Barlow gave Broom a fragment of a palate with a single molar attached. Broom, as usual, paid Barlow for the fossil, but when Broom asked from where it had come, Barlow was evasive. Broom noticed that the matrix was different from that in which the fossils from Sterkfontein were usually embedded. Some days later, he again visited Barlow and this time insisted that he reveal the source of the fossil.

Barlow told Broom that Gert Terblanche, a local schoolboy, had given him the fossil palate. Broom obtained some teeth from Gert, and together they went to the nearby Kromdraai farm, where the boy had gotten the teeth by pounding them from a fossil skull. Broom collected the skull fragments, and Gert also gave Broom a piece of lower jaw and more teeth. After reconstructing the partial skull, Broom saw it was different from the Sterkfontein type. He called the new creature Paranthropus robustus. As the name robustus indicates, this australopithecine hominid had a larger jaw and bigger teeth than Australopithecus africanus, represented by the Taung baby, and the gracile Plesianthropus specimens from Sterkfontein. The Kromdraai site is now considered to be approximately 1.0 to

1.2 million years old (Groves 1989, p. 198), although some have suggested an age of up to 1.8 million years (Tobias 1978, p. 67).