The discovery of hominin fossils at Sterkfontein, South Africa, was eighty years ago this year. Recognizing the occasion, Jason Heaton, Travis Pickering and Dominic Stratford have a post on the Scientific American website: “The Fossil That Rewrote Human Prehistory”.
In August 1936, Robert Broom, a Scottish doctor with a keen interest in paleontology, visited a lime quarry in South Africa called Sterkfontein. In a guidebook at the time, the owner of the site, wrote, “Come to Sterkfontein and find the ‘missing link.’” It would not be long before Broom did just that.
It’s a nice short summary of the history of excavations at the site, which continues to produce new evidence about human origins.