Careful examination of the historical records suggests that the hoax was probably a joke that went badly wrong
Francis Thackeray
Professor Francis Thackeray (now retired) is a South African palaeoanthropologist and an honorary research associate of the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He served as the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand from 2009 to 2013, and as head of the department of palaeontology at the Transvaal Museum (now the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria). He obtained a PhD in anthropology from Yale.