Rhodesian Man: Notes on a New Femur Fragment

The femur fragment described here was found in the deep cave in No. i Kopje, Broken Hill, on June i8 I92I. In I938 the late Captain A. W. Whittington of Bulawayo informed me that the femur had been found by his wife' the day after Mr T. Zwigelaar had found the nearly complete skull of Homo rhodesiensis. On the afternoon following this now famous discovery it seems that Mrs Whittington was lowered on a rope into the cavity opened up at the lower end of the deep cave or sinkhole at the go foot level in the opencast. From the rubble that littered the floor of the cavity she recovered the part of the human femur here described together with a large, well made, stone spheroid. In I929 the fragment was shown to the Abbe Breuil who confirmed that it was from a human femur and that it was fossilised. About I948 Captain Whittington offered to sell the two specimens to the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum at Livingstone where I was then Director, but the offer was declined because the museum at that time lacked the money with which to purchase them. In I954, on examining the Broken Hill femur in the British Museum (Natural History), it was noted that the central part of this bone was missing and had been reconstructed. It then appeared possible that the fragment found by Mrs Whittington might be the missing part of the specimen in the British Museum. An attempt was therefore made to have Mrs Whittington's fragment available for examination at the 3rd Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, held at Livingstone in the following year. This was unsuccessful. However, an account of the discovery of the fragment appeared in the Bulawayo Chronicle accompanied by a rather poor photograph, which confirmed the possibility that this was the missing piece of the British Museum specimen. The fragment remained in the possession of Captain and Mrs Whittington until November I955 when it, and the spheroid, were purchased and presented to the National Museum of Southern Rhodesia at Bulawayo. In I963, after Captain Whittington's death, I was in the Bulawayo museum and had occasion to enquire of the Curator, R. F. H. Summers, F.S.A., whether he knew anything of the whereabouts of these specimens. They were thus brought to light and the femur