Mary Elizabeth Barber, the Bowkers and South African prehistory

A recent paper by Peter Mitchell (1998), in this journal, gave an account o f the South African Stone Age collections of the British Museum. This artic le expands on the very earliest discoveries in the nineteenth century and s ome of the personalities involved. Mary Elizabeth Barber was on of the firs t to appreciate the significance of the stone tools that her brother Thomas Henry Bowker had discovered. As a natural historian, she was a major influ ence on many of her family members and friends. Between them this group of people collected and described a number of botanical and entomological spec ies new to science, helped to establish the stratigraphic geology of South Africa for the first time, and began the exploration of its ethnology, arch aeology and palaeontology. These early settlers, many of whom had only a ru dimentary education and were largely self-taught, deserve better recognitio n.