Andre Keyser

Who is Andre Keyser?

Andre Werner Keyser, was a South African palaeontologist and geologist noted for his discovery of the Drimolen hominid site and of numerous hominid remains.

In 1994 he discovered a female Paranthropus robustus skull, nicknamed Eurydice, the most complete australopithecine skull ever excavated.

In 1997 he found two children’s skulls some 1.5 to 2 million years old. The children were under 3 years old at the time of their death, and were found at the Drimolen site near the Sterkfontein Caves.

In the 1930s Robert Broom, acting on a suggestion from a Transvaal Museum lepidopterist, was the first palaeontologist to visit Gladysvale Cave, hoping to find a hominid fossil cave close to Johannesburg. In 1946 Phillip Tobias recovered a baboon fossil from the site. The 1948 Camp-Peabody expedition from the United States failed to find any hominid remains. The site was then forgotten until 1991 when Lee Berger and Andre Keyser started excavations. They soon found two teeth of Australopithecus africanus, making Gladysvale the first new hominid site in South Africa since the 1948 discovery of Swartkrans by Robert Broom.

Since then the site has yielded more than a quarter of a million fossils in excavations by teams from the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Zurich and Duke University. These fossils include, beside hominids, antelope, extinct wolves, giant zebra and monkeys.