Question: When did the country where Bell first tried to get a patent take control of the country where the most australopithecus fossils have been found?

<P0-S0> In 1875, Bell developed an acoustic telegraph and drew up a patent application for it. <P0-S1> Since he had agreed to share U.S. profits with his investors Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, Bell requested that an associate in Ontario, George Brown, attempt to patent it in Britain, instructing his lawyers to apply for a patent in the U.S. only after they received word from Britain (Britain would issue patents only for discoveries not previously patented elsewhere). <SEP> <P1-S0> Following the defeat of the Boers in the Anglo - Boer or South African War (1899 -- 1902), the Union of South Africa was created as a dominion of the British Empire in terms of the South Africa Act 1909, which amalgamated the four previously separate British colonies: Cape Colony, Natal Colony, Transvaal Colony, and Orange River Colony. <P1-S1> The country became a self - governing nation state within the British Empire, in 1934 following enactment of the Status of the Union Act. <P1-S2> The dominion came to an end on 31 May 1961 as the consequence of a 1960 referendum, which legitimised the country becoming a sovereign state named Republic of South Africa. <P1-S3> A republican constitution was adopted. <SEP> <P2-S0> Then, in 1997, an almost complete Australopithecus skeleton with skull was found in the Sterkfontein caves of Gauteng, South Africa. <P2-S1> It is now called ``Little Foot ''and it is probably around three million years old. <P2-S2> It was named Australopithecus prometheus which has since been placed within A. africanus. <P2-S3> Other fossil remains found in the same cave in 2008 were named Australopithecus sediba, which lived 1.9 million years ago. <P2-S4> A. africanus probably evolved into A. sediba, which some scientists think may have evolved into H. erectus, though this is heavily disputed. <SEP> <P3-S0> bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing bell's life's work. <P3-S1> his research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in bell being awarded the first u.s. patent for the telephone in 1876. <P3-S2> [n 4] bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study. <P3-S3> [n 5] <SEP> <P4-S0> the question of priority for the variable resistance feature of the telephone was raised by the examiner before he approved bell's patent application. <P4-S1> he told bell that his claim for the variable resistance feature was also described in gray's caveat. <P4-S2> bell pointed to a variable resistance device in bell's previous application in which bell described a cup of mercury, not water. <P4-S3> bell had filed the mercury application at the patent office a year earlier on february 25, 1875, long before elisha gray described the water device. <P4-S4> in addition, gray abandoned his caveat, and because he did not contest bell's priority, the examiner approved bell's patent on march 3, 1876. gray had reinvented the variable resistance telephone, but bell was the first to write down the idea and the first to test it in a telephone.