Education: Pawky Scot

Nosing about on a farm some 50 miles from Johannesburg in 1938, bright-eyed Robert Broom found the left side of a manlike skull, a mandible, the distal end of a humerus, the proximal end of an ulna, some finger bones. In 1941 Broom & friends found part of a lower jaw. In September Broom found an anklebone. Last week there was still no evidence of murder.

Scottish-born, 76-year-old Dr. Broom (TIME, Jan. 16, 1939) is interested in early man, about whom he has written six books and close to 400 articles. The bones he found at the Kromdraai farm he attributes to higher primates which lived some 500,000 years ago. He sees in them “interesting affinities to man.” Broom thinks the Kromdraai ape man may be a survivor of forms out of which man sprang a million years ago. The new anklebone, small compared with the skull, leads Broom to believe that Kromdraai’s large brain would not have been required for his “muscular economy” and “was partly used for thinking.”

Dr. Broom is Keeper of Vertebrate Paleontology & Anthropology in Pretoria’s big Transvaal Museum. When the University of Pretoria (whose Boer-descended students are anti-Smuts and anti-British) set up a new medical faculty, it asked Broom to lecture on anatomy, waived the fact that he speaks no Afrikaans. He began—but then his lecturing in English was denounced by an Afrikaans-minded newspaper, the Johannesburg Transvaler. Broom thereupon addressed his medical students thus:

“There is not a single scientific work of any consequence written in the Afrikaans language. Today nearly all important works on science are being published in the United States—in English. … If you prefer to confine your reading to Afrikaans, you needn’t bother with science.”

Next day pawky Robert Broom resigned, went back to studying animals which used their brains partly for thinking.