Fossil Man in South Africa 



A LETTER F R O M DR. ROBE R T BROOM 



FEIENDS of the Museum will recall 

 with pleasure the visit of Dr. Eobert 

 Broom, the well-known South African 

 palaeontologist, two years ago. Dr. Broom's 

 stay resulted in the acquisition by the Mu- 

 seum of his splendid collection of fossil 

 reptiles from the Permian of South Africa, 

 and in a series of valuable researches upon 

 these and other fossil vertebrates. The 

 outbreak of the great war found him on 

 his way back home, but he promptly 

 enlisted, served for a term in his profes- 

 sional capacity as army surgeon, and has 

 since returned to South Africa. His con- 

 tinued interest in the Museum and apprecia- 

 tion of its work and ideals are shown in the 

 following announcement of an important 

 new discovery: 



Port Elizabeth, South Africa 

 November IS, 1916. 

 My dear Professor Osborn : 



Knowing how interested you are in primi- 

 tive man, I thought you would be pleased to 

 have an early account of what is, with the 

 exception of the Piltdown skull, the most in- 

 teresting early skull known. 



In 1913 a fanner digging a trench 

 through surface laterite on his farm at Bos- 

 kop near Potchefstroom, Transvaal, discov- 

 ered much of the skull and some fragmen- 

 tary remains of a human skeleton. The re- 

 mains are now in the Port Elizabeth Mu- 

 seum. A preliminary note has been made 

 on the remains by Mr. S. H. Haughton, of 

 Cape Town, and his view is endorsed by 

 Dr. L. Peringuey, of Cape Town— that the 

 remains are those of an early type of mod- 

 ern man most nearly allied to the Cro-Mag- 

 non type and perhaps ancestral to existing 

 African types. 



The skull is represented by the nearly per- 

 fect frontals and parietals with part of the 

 occipital, the nearly perfect right temporal, 

 and the greater part of the horizontal ramus 

 of the left mandible. The skull is of great 

 length. The calvarium as preserved meas- 

 ures 205 mm. and the greatest length was 

 probaVjly originally about 210 mm. The 

 bones are extremely thick. The parietals in 

 the region of the eminences measure 13-15 



mm. and the frontals 12 mm. The cranium 

 is quite unlike that of the Neanderthal type 

 in having a well-marked, low, but not re- 

 treating brow, and very feebly developed 

 supra-orbital ridges — not much larger than 

 in most KaflSrs. Notwithstanding the thick- 

 ness of the skull, the brain is enormous. 

 The restored brain cast indicates that the 

 cranial capacity was about 1960 c.c. 



The lower jaw has lost, unfortunately, all 

 teeth except the roots of the second molar, 

 but the socket of the canine is fairly well 

 preserved, and there is to my mind no doubt 

 that the canine was about as large as in the 

 jaw which I still believe belongs to the Pilt- 

 down skull. The incisors must also have 

 been very much larger than in any modern 

 man. The transverse measurement across 

 the two canines cannot by any possibility 

 have been less than 40 mm. and was proba- 

 bly 44 mm. A large Kaffir jaw on my table 

 has a corresponding measurement of only 

 32 mm. 



In a paper I have just sent to the Zoo- 

 logical Society, London, I have regarded the 

 Boskop skull as the type of a new species of 

 man. Homo capensis. I regard it as inter- 

 mediate between the "dawn man," Eoan- 

 thropus dawsoni, and the early African type 

 of man as represented by the Cro-Magnon 

 man and the ancestral negroid type. The 

 Australian native is regarded as possibly 

 also derived from a similar early type, and 

 perhaps even the Neanderthal man, whom I 

 regard as not a primitive but a highly spe- 

 cialized type. Homo capensis has very small 

 frontal sinuses and supra-orbital ridges. 

 Homo neanderthalcnsis differs but little ex- 

 cept in having the modern type of dentition 

 and in having the ridges and sinuses greatly 

 developed. 



The skull is completely fossilized — every 

 cavity of the bone being filled by laterite. 

 These surface laterites have long been known 

 to be of great age, but exactly how old we 

 cannot say. In our surface deposits we have 

 also long known a great abundance of huge 

 houchers [skinning knives] of Chellean or 

 Acheulean types, but hitherto we have never 

 obtained any human remains. In a gravel 

 deposit in the Kimberley district 'houchers 



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