The first two decades of the twentieth century were formative times for the field of palaeoanthropology. Many of the important fossil discoveries were still new. The site of Le Moustier in France, which provided the name of the stone tool culture associated with Neanderthals, was discovered in 1908, and in the same year the nearly complete skeleton of a Neanderthal was excavated in the cave at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, adding to the fragmentary remains that had been recovered before. The consensus at the time was that Neanderthals made up a stage of human evolution, more primitive than but ancestral to the Cro-Magnon people, whose skeletons had first been discovered in 1868. The Cro-Magnon people were the makers of Aurignacian tools, implements that were felt to be the beginning of the technological revolution leading to modern humans. The question of racial origins crept in with the discovery of human remains from Chancelade in France in 1888 and two skeletons in 1901 from the Italian site of Grimaldi. Together, these specimens were said to represent ‘Caucasoid’, ‘Mongoloid’ and ‘Negroid’ races, indicating that the origin of all modern peoples must have been in Europe – an anthropological Garden of Eden. Then, in 1912, the critical evidence of a missing link between apes and humans was found in Piltdown in England. Although ultimately the Piltdown skull was shown to be a forgery, its presence in the scientific literature at the base of the human evolutionary tree was virtually unchallenged for 30 years. All of these sites were in Europe and all that was really at issue was which part of Europe had been the place where humans had evolved – England, France, Germany or Italy. Evidence from elsewhere was dismissed as unimportant or not really about humans. The interpretation of the time was quite clear: humanity had evolved and diversified in Europe, the current home of the most advanced form of humanity.

None of these great anthropological debates was an issue in the mind of Piet Botha in October 1913 as he dug a drainage ditch on his farm Koloniesplaats, a few kilometres from the village of Boskop in what was then the Transvaal Province of South Africa. The shovels hit some darkly stained bones encased in a soil matrix at about 1.3 metres deep in the trench and about 80 metres from the bank of the Mooi River (Haughton, Thomson and Péringuey 1917, 2).