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emigrated to Cape Town. His daughter always said that it was the flowers that drew him
back.

He settled in Fish Hoek in 1920 and began exploring the local mountains. In what was

then know as the Schildergat Cave he picked up what he thought were stone tools, made

by early man, and so he went to the University of Cape Town to find an archaeologist. At
that point John Goodwin, was the only archaeologist in the Cape and was busy

establishing the Department of Archaeology at UCT. Knowing that he had no time to
conduct the excavation he asked Victor and his son Bertie if they would like to work in

the cave under his guidance, and, after a crash course in exploration techniques, they set
to work.

Immediately there was a problem in that they both had jobs and so could only work in
the evenings, at weekends and during their annual leave and, as it was a public place,

they could not leave anything they found on site. However, they did make some very

significant discoveries. They found many stone tools, ranging from hand axes dating
from the Earlier Stone Age to smaller implements from the Middle and Later Stone

Ages, and also the remains of nine people who had been buried in the cave. One of these
became famous at the time as Fish Hoek Man. They realised that they had found

something significant, and in fact the skull of Fish Hoek Man proved to have the largest
brain size among any human remains that had been found anywhere up to that time. On

the day they found it the whole family was in the cave and, so the story goes, Mrs. Peers

took off her hat and they put the skull into it and carried it home. John Goodwin took it
to England to be dated: 15,000 years was the initial date, but this has recently been

revised to 7,000 years which places it in the Late Stone Age.

In 1932 there was a big meeting of the South African Association for the Advancement
of Science in Durban which was attended by many European archaeologists. At the

opening General Smuts stated that the Fish Hoek cave promised to be one of the