Background

Robert Broom was born on November 30, 1866, in Paisley, Scotland. Broom was the second son of John Broom, a designer of calicoes and Paisley shawls who, during Robert’s youth, was engaged in business in Glasgow, and of Agnes Shearer Broom.

Education

Broom attended Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow and in 1883 entered the University of Glasgow, where he assisted in the chemistry laboratory. He attended lectures of Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), but was most strongly influenced by the botanist F. O. Bower and the anatomist John Cleland, who introduced him to the work of Sir Richard Owen and the embryological researches of W. K. Parker. In 1889 he received his medical degree, and in 1892 he went to Australia. He received his Doctor of Science degree in 1905 from the University of Glasgow.

Career

Broom practiced medicine most of his fife, frequently in remote rural communities. From 1903 until 1910 he held the professorship of zoology and geology at Victoria College (now Stellenbosch University), and from 1934 until his death he served as curator of paleontology at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria. Throughout his life, his research was interspersed with the duties of his profession.

Broom was invited to deliver the Croonian lecture of the Royal Society of London in 1913; in 1920 he was elected to fellowship in the society. Numerous honorary doctorates, honorary fellowships in distinguished academies, and medals were awarded to him in his later years; these have been listed by Watson and by Cooke.

Between his medical calls in the backcountry of Australia, Broom began to investigate the anatomy of the native marsupials and primitive egg-laying monotremes. One of Broom’s earliest investigations was of the development of Jacobson’s organ, a sensory structure in the nose. In monotremes, this organ is supported by a pair of small bones that Broom identified with the paired prevomers near the front of the palate of reptiles. In nine papers published between 1895 and 1935, he sought to demonstrate by both embryonic relationships and features of the palate of mammallike reptiles that the reptilian and mammalian vomers were not homologous. He relied largely upon the similarity between the anomodont reptile Dicynodon and the platypus, despite his recognition that both of these were side branches from the main fine of mammalian evolution. Aside from the vomer question, Broom’s interest in Jacobson’s organ was renewed whenever young specimens of uncommon animals reached his hands, and he reported his findings in fifteen papers published between 1895 and 1939.

In the course of studying the embryonic development of the skull in the Australian phalanger Trichosurus, Broom discovered that the mammalian alisphenoid bone does not form in the wall of the braincase but arises from the palate, like the slender epipterygoid bone of lizards and other reptiles (1907). Subsequently, he was able to show this transition from reptilian to mammalian condition in the skulls of various mammal-like reptiles. In some ways, this is the most important of Broom’s many contributions to vertebrate morphology.

One of the major problems of mammalian development was the origin of the three auditory ossicles; some students regarded them as the result of fragmentation of the single sound-transmitting bone in the ear of reptiles or amphibians; others followed Reichert (1838) and Huxley in the view that the outer two bones of the mammalian chain represent the articular and quadrate bones that form the jaw articulation of reptiles. Broom accepted the former view in 1890 and 1904, but in 1911 he reversed his opinion and in 1912 showed how the bones of anomodont reptiles conformed to Reichert’s theory. He presented a series of reconstructions suggesting the mode of transition from the reptilian to the mammalian ear condition.

In 1936 Broom turned again to this question and noted that evidence of an extracolumellar portion of the stapes in therocephalians confirmed his earlier opinion that the tympanic membrane of mammal-like reptiles lay close behind the quadrate bone, rather than embedded in the notch of the angular.

Other morphological questions that engaged Broom’s attention included the homologies of the variable number of bones at the base of the brain in mammals; the homologies of the coracoid bones of the shoulder region; the peculiarities of the epiphyses at the ends of the metacarpal and metatarsal bones; the arrangement of the reptilian tarsal bones; and the homologies of skull arches in lizards - a problem in which his conclusions based upon embryological and morphological studies were spectacularly confirmed in 1934 when Parrington described a Triassic ancestral lizard, Prolacerta, that shows an extremely early stage in the disappearance of the lower temporal arch.

But it is for the study of the fossil reptiles of the Karroo that Broom is most famous. In 1896, when he visited his father in Britain, he had an opportunity to examine Seeley’s collection of African fossils at the British Museum. Grasping their significance for the problem of the origin of mammals, he sailed for South Africa.

The nineteenth-century work on the mammal-like reptiles by Owen and Seeley was largely descriptive. It had revealed considerable variety in the fauna and had shown that some of these fossils approached the structure of mammals more closely than did other known reptiles. Broom revealed the details of the skull structure of these animals by splitting specimens with a chisel or by sawing cross-sections through them. He thus placed their classification on a firm morphological basis; showed that they had been derived from the pelycosaurs of North America, which his contemporaries had classified with the lizard-like Sphenodon of New Zealand; and demonstrated how the distinctive mammalian structures had arisen within the therapsid suborders.

As early as 1902 he recognized that certain carnivorous therapsids had a far more primitive palate than the extremely mammal-like cynodonts that Seeley had discovered, and he proposed the suborder Therocephalia for the earlier forms. By 1905 he had arrived at the basic groupings of the African forms, which, modified in the light of later discoveries, are still used.

Beginning in 1905, Broom attempted to record the stratigraphic occurrence of various fossils in the thick sequence of Karroo deposits. Building on the earlier work of Seeley, he established the standard sequence of faunal zones. This attention to stratigraphy as well as to morphological detail prepared him for the brilliant synthesis of the African and North American Permian faunas at which he arrived after seeing the American fossils on a brief visit to the American Museum of Natural History in 1910.

Broom described an unbelievably large number of fossils. His brief descriptions are generally accompanied by rather unfinished sketches, which are praised by some of his colleagues for their remarkable fidelity and intuition, and condemned by others for showing structures still concealed by matrix and for carrying restoration beyond the available evidence.

These studies of Karroo fossils, as well as the embryological investigations of mammalian development, formed the basis for numerous essays on the origin of mammals, the earliest in 1908; the Croonian lecture to the Royal Society of London in 1913; and The Origin of the Human Skeleton and The Mammallike Reptiles of South Africa.

Following World War I, Broom practiced medicine at Douglas, remote from fossil beds and contact with other scientists. It was during this period that his attention first turned to the problems of prehistoric man in Africa and the physical characteristics of African races. His 1923 survey of the Hottentots, Bushmen, and extinct Korana race defined many of the problems of South African anthropology and laid the basis for subsequent work, which has not confirmed his views of racial relationships.

When Raymond Dart announced the discovery of the Australopithecus skull at Taungs in 1925, Broom, on the basis of a personal examination of the specimen, supported Dart’s conclusions as to its human relationships and phylogenetic importance. After he had been appointed a curator of paleontology in the Transvaal Museum, he turned his attention to the Pleistocene cave deposits, hoping to find additional evidence of early man. This quest was rewarded by the discovery of Plesianthropus within a week of Broom’s first visit to Sterkfontein. Other important specimens were found at Kromdraai in 1938, at Sterkfontein again in 1946-1947, and at Swartkrans in 1949. Broom has given a vivid account of the excitement of these discoveries in Finding the Missing Link (1950). He not only collected, but also prepared, illustrated, and described, this material when he was well over eighty years of age.

Between the time Broom retired from medical practice in 1928 and his appointment at the Transvaal Museum in 1934, he wrote three books. The Origin of the Human Skeleton (1930) provides a rapid survey of vertebrate evolution, followed by a discussion of the transition from reptiles to mammals, as shown by the mammal-like reptiles, and of the various problems that had held his attention for so many years. A final chapter deals with the inadequacies of the views of Lamarck and Darwin as explanations of evolution. The Mammal-like Reptiles of South Africa and the Origin of Mammals (1932) is-illustrated with several hundred of Broom’s rough restorations, which he defends as more useful than the exact portrayal of fragmentary specimens. The problem of evolution and its causation is explored more boldly. In The Coming of Man. Was It Accident or Design? (1933) Broom criticizes various theories of evolution in detail.

Achievements

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  Bromm's major achievement was in a series of spectacular finds that he made, including fragments from six hominids in Sterkfontein, which he named Plesianthropus transvaalensis. In 1937, Broom made his most famous discovery of Paranthropus robustus. These discoveries helped support Dart's claims for the Taung species.
  
  These discoveries finally convinced the scientific community that Australopithecus africanus was an ancestor of modern humans. Broom later discovered a hominid pelvis fragment which gave the first evidence that these hominids walked upright.
  
  The remainder of Broom's career was devoted to the exploration and the interpretation of the many early hominin remains discovered there. For his volume, The South Africa Fossil Ape-Men, The Australopithecinae, in which he proposed the Australopithecinae subfamily, Broom was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1946.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sterkfontein ape-man Plesianthropus 1949
  • The mammal-like reptiles of South Africa and the origin of mammals 1932
  • An Introduction To The Geology Of Cape Colony 1905
  • The coming of man: was it accident or design? 1933
  • Finding the Missing Link 1950
  • On the palate, occiput and hind foot of Bauria cynops Broom 1937
  • The South African fossil ape-man: The Australopithecinae 1946
  • A comparison of the Permian reptiles of North America with those of South Africa 1910
  • On Australopithecus and its affinities 1937
  • Les origines de l'homme 1933
  • The evidence afforded by the Boskop skull of a new species of primitive man (Homo capensis) 1918

Religion

Broom's mother belonged to the strict sect of the Plymouth Brethren; he retained strong religious beliefs throughout his life and sought to explain organic evolution as the result of some cosmic intelligence or plan.

Views

Broom believed in spiritual evolution, which sees animals and plants as too complex to have arisen by chance - an evolutionary outlook far more compatible with religion than Darwinian evolution. Educated at the height of the wave of evolutionary biology that followed Darwin’s work, Broom devoted his career to unraveling the phylogenetic problems that the nineteenth-century morphologists and paleontologists had raised. His unrelenting drive to investigate these problems, his complete willingness to travel to regions where critical material might be found, and especially his unusual talent for combining paleontological and embryological research enabled him to contribute more to the story of mammalian origins than all his contemporaries together.

Broom was a nonconformist and was deeply interested in the paranormal and spiritualism; he was a critic of Darwinism and materialism. In his book The Coming of Man: Was it Accident or Design? (1933) he claimed that "spiritual agencies" had guided evolution as animals and plants were too complex to have arisen by chance. According to Broom, there were at least two different kinds of spiritual forces, and psychics are capable of seeing them. Broom claimed there were a plan and purpose in evolution and that the origin of Homo sapiens is the ultimate purpose behind evolution.

Quotations: "Much of evolution looks as if it had been planned to result in man, and in other animals and plants to make the world a suitable place for him to dwell in."

Membership

Based on his continuing studies of these fossils and mammalian anatomy Broom was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920.

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  Royal Society , United Kingdom

  1920 - 1951

Personality

As a child Robert was afflicted with respiratory troubles that obliged him to spend a year at the seaside, where he was introduced to marine biology by a retired army officer, John Leavach. His father, an enthusiastic amateur botanist, encouraged the boy’s interest in natural history, as did contact with well-known Glasgow naturalists who frequently visited at the Broom summer home near Linlithgow. Also from his father, Robert acquired his facility at drawing and a liberal religious viewpoint.

Later in life, fossil collecting was his hobby; he also collected paintings and stamps, and played chess.

Physical Characteristics: As a child, he was afflicted with asthma and other respiratory troubles.

Interests

• drawing, fossils, chess, art

Connections

In 1893 Robert Broom married Mary Baird Baillie in Sydney, whence she had followed him from Scotland. After a brief visit with his father in Scotland in 1896, he went to South Africa early in 1897 and thereafter made it his home.

Father:

John Broom

Mother:

Agnes Hunter Shearer

Wife:

Mary Baird Baillie

collaborator:

John Talbot Robinson

John Talbot Robinson (10 January 1923 – 12 October 2001) was a distinguished South African hominin paleontologist. His most famous discovery (with Robert Broom) was the nearly complete fossil skull of the hominin species Australopithecus africanus, known as Mrs. Ples.

teacher:

Frederick Orpen Bower

References

• The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution
  2008
• The Runaway Brain: The Evolution Of Human Uniqueness
  1993
• Dr Robert Broom Palaeontologist & Physician 1866 - 1951
  1972
• ROBERT BROOM - HIS LIFE AND WORK.
  1951
• Robert Broom Commemorative Volume
  1948