Robert Broom
Robert Broom ( born November 30, 1866 in Paisley, Scotland; † 6 April 1951) was a South African doctor and paleontologist Scottish origin, who was best known for the discovery and exploration of pre-human remains.
Life
Broom approved in 1895 and his doctorate in 1905 as a physician at the University of Glasgow. His specialty was obstetrics.
In 1893 he married Mary Baird Baillie.
On long trips, he attended a self-taught, which fascinated him above all the question of the origin of mammals. This led him to Australia in 1892 and five years later, in the South African Republic, where he remained throughout his life.
From 1903 on he was professor of zoology and geology at Victoria College in Stellenbosch. However, in 1910 he lost his job at the Institute extremely conservative and religiously-minded, because he persistently pleaded for the theory of evolution. He went into the remote Karoo, where he practiced as a doctor.
There he continued to struggle with paleontology and earned a worldwide reputation for his studies on mammal -like reptiles ( Therapsida ). He became head of the department of vertebrate paleontology at the South African Museum in Cape Town and was admitted in 1920 as a member of the Royal Society, of which he used for his discoveries that shed new light on the problem of the origin of mammals 1928 Royal Medal " " received.
After the discovery of the " Taung child " - the skull of an australopithecine - child - by Raymond Dart also be interested in paleoanthropology grew.
At times Brooms career as a renowned scientist, however, seemed over and he threatened to impoverish the situation described as darts Jan Smuts in a letter. Smuts exerted pressure on the South African government and succeeded in 1934 to procure Broom as an assistant in paleontology at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria.
In the following years he made a series of spectacular fossil finds, including the remains of hominids in Sterkfontein six, which he described as Plesianthropus transvaalensis and were later assigned to Australopithecus africanus. One of the skulls was as " Mrs. Ples " known. This finding was based darts theory that if it were an early hominids at the " Taung Child ".
Other discoveries followed. From 1937 Broom dug in Kromdraai, after a student had there found fossil teeth. There he made his most important discovery in 1938: Paranthropus robustus the ( Australopithecus robustus originally ).
In 1946 Broom an extensive monograph on the australopithecines out. This and investigations conducted by the influential British scientist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark that have been published in the scientific journal "Nature", procured the theories about the early hominids international recognition.
In 1948, he began excavations at Swartkrans, where they found the first remains of Homo ergaster later designated hominins and other fossils of Australopithecus. By the end of his life he worked on publications, determined to prefer " to wear out than to rust ." Shortly before his death in 1951 he completed another monograph on the australopithecines and told about it to his nephew: "This is now complete ... just like myself "
Publications (selection)
Nearly a hundred scientific publications were published by Broom, are some of them:
- " Fossil Reptiles of South Africa" in Science in South Africa ( 1905)
- " Reptiles of the Karroo Formation" in Geology of Cape Colony (1909 )
- " Development and Morphology " of the Marsupial Shoulder Girdle in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh ( 1899)
- "Comparison of Permian Reptiles of North America with Those of South Africa" in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History ( 1910)
- " Structure of Skull in Cynodont Reptiles " in Proceedings of the zoölogical Society ( 1911).
- The Pleistocene Anthropoid Apes of South Africa. Nature, vol 142, 1938, pp. 377-379
- Another new type of fossil ape -man. In: Nature, vol 163, 1949, pp. 57
- Swartkrans Ape -Man, Paranthropus crassidens. Transvaal Museum, Volume 6, 1952