Charles Kimberlin Brain

Charles Kimberlin Brain (7 May 1931 – 6 June 2023), also known as C. K. "Bob" Brain, was a South African paleontologist who studied and taught African cave taphonomy for more than fifty years.

Brain was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia on 7 May 1931. He was the son of the entomologist, Charles Kimberlin Brain , the Director of Agriculture of Southern Rhodesia, and Zoe Findlay.

From 1965 to 1991, Brain directed the Transvaal Museum, which became one of the most scientifically productive institutions of its kind in Africa during his tenure.^{[citation needed]}

During his years at the museum, Brain actively pursued his own research, which was A-rated by the Foundation for Research Development (now the National Research Foundation of South Africa) from the inception of its evaluation system in 1984 until his retirement.

Brain planned and scripted the displays in the museum's "Life’s Genesis I" and "Life's Genesis 2" halls, which have been seen by several million visitors.

Very early in Brain's career, Robert Ardrey wrote of him:

[In 1958] I was spending a night in a South African village with a party of scientists. One in the party was Dr. C. K. Brain, an amazing young man from the Transvaal Museum.

Brain is a scientist's scientist, and I know of none so young on any continent who has acquired from achievements so varied a reputation quite so wide. He is a Rhodesian, from a family related to that of Eugène Marais. He has a long, distinguished face and his mode of expression, unlike my own, is as a rule one of long, distinguished silences. Brain was twenty-seven at the time, and had taken his doctorate in geology.

He had followed this with three fruitful years in anthropology, in which time he had furnished palaeontology with its only comprehensive geological survey of all five australopithecine sites; had developed techniques of ancient dating never thought of before by anyone; and with his uncovering of primitive stone handaxes at Sterkfontein had made a discovery ranked by Dr. Kenneth P. Oakley of the British Museum as one of the anthropological milestones of the century."

— Robert Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 69, 1961.