Robert Broom. Scottish-South African palaeonto- logist Robert Broom (1866-1951), seen here dressed for fieldwork. He was appointed as a palaeontologist at the Transvaal Museum, Pretoria, after emigrating to South Africa in 1897. Broom worked on the origins of humans, finding two important hominid (early human) fossils: Australopithicus africanus and A. robustus. These discoveries finally convinced the scientific community that A. africanus was an ancestor of modern humans. Broom later discovered a hominid pelvis fragment which gave the first evidence that these hominids walked upright.