Abstract
As an anatomist working on modern baboons at the University of the Witwatersrand, Trevor Jones1 described a partial cranium of a Plio-Pleistocene baboon (Sts 564) from the Sterkfontein Caves in the Cradle of Humankind. He named it Parapapio broomi, a new genus and species in honour of Dr Robert Broom who was based at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria from 1934 until his death in 1951 (the museum is now referred to as the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History). Jones was a student of Professor Raymond Dart who had encouraged Broom to work at Sterkfontein after this site had yielded fossil baboons similar to those that had been found at Taung2 – the site from which the holotype specimen of Australopithecus africanus was discovered in 19243. It is now recognised that Parapapio and hominins are often found together in pene-contemporaneous Plio- Pleistocene deposits in Africa. The first hominin to be found at Sterkfontein (TM 1511, A. africanus) was discovered in 1936, soon after the initial discovery of fossil baboons at the site by Trevor Jones and two of Dart’s other students from the University of the Witwatersrand.