According to Johanson & Edgar (1996), Broom had vowed in 1936 to find an adult version of Raymond Dart’s famous find, the Taung child. 64 kilometers west of Johannesburg, Dart’s students had been investigating a cave used to mine limestone. This cave caught Broom’s eye, and he insisted that anything with vague resemblance to a hominid be brought to his attention. Eight days later, on August 17, 1936, Broom was presented with two thirds of an endocast, similar to Dart’s Taung child. Broom, searching through the breccia, found the base of a skull, some teeth and a severely damaged maxilla. World war interrupted Broom’s excavations into Sterkfontein, and it was only in 1947 that work was reinitiated. Using dynamite to blow away the breccia, Broom and his colleagues finally discovered what they had been waiting for – An adult skull. Unfortunately, the dynamite blast had split the skull into two major fragments, and science learned a lesson on that day. After the skull had been cleaned and prepared for analysis, paleoanthropologists surmised that the skull was that of an adult female, and therefore the press dubbed it “Mrs. Ples” Nevertheless, there is still debate as to its gender, as recent studies suggest it is male. The significance of this find lies in the fact that the skull drew international attention, as the Tuang child was considered by conservatives to be merely a juvenile ape. The discovery of an adult “almost human” redefined these views, and Africa began to take its rightful throne as the Cradle of Humankind.