Robert Broom

Robert Broom (1866 to 1951) was a Scottish-born medical doctor and palaeontologist who worked in South Africa. Born in Paisley, he qualified in medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1895, where he specialised in obstetrics, and after practising in Australia he settled in South Africa in 1897. He was professor of zoology and geology at Victoria College in Stellenbosch from 1903 to 1910 and later keeper of vertebrate palaeontology at the South African Museum in Cape Town, while keeping a medical practice in the Karoo, a region rich in fossils of mammal-like reptiles. He described hundreds of therapsid fossils, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920, and from the 1930s identified early hominin fossils at Sterkfontein, Kromdraai and Swartkrans, including the skull nicknamed Mrs Ples and the genus Paranthropus. His collecting of human remains and his racial classifications of the Khoisan are now discredited and criticised. He died in Pretoria.