Robert Broom (front right) a palaeoanthropologist, with his original notes, press-cuttings & two of his hominid fossil finds. Broom was born in Scotland in 1866 and died in 1951. He discovered numerous hominid fossils in the caves of South Africa, which he assigned to the subfamily Australopithecinae. Raymond Dart had first described this group in 1925. His claim that it represented the earliest ancestor of man was ridiculed until the discoveries of Broom confirmed that the group was bipedal, erect, had man-like dentition and relatively small brains. The skull seen here is Australopithecus africanus, a gracile australopithecine.