Species Peersia vanheerdei

For Victor Stanley Peers (1874–1940), Australian botanist and amateur archaeologist. He came to South Africa in 1899 during the South African War. Later he joined the South African Railways where he worked for 30 years. He lived in Fish Hoek with his family, where his son Bertie was born in 1903. Together father and son, keen amateur naturalists, archaeologists and palaeontologists, explored various caves and rock shelters in the area. In one of these caves, since named Peers Cave, they came across the fossil remains of ‘the Fish Hoek Man’. Further researchers found other skeletons and artefacts going back 200 000 years. Peers’s discovery created great interest at the time but no really significant findings were made. Peers died in Cape Town.