Obituary: Phillip Tobias, played a key role in proving that South Africa was the true cradle of humankind

BORN: 14 October 1925, in Durban, South Africa. Died: 7 June, 2012, in Johannesburg, South Africa, aged 86

Nobody did more to persuade a distrustful world that South Africa was the true cradle of mankind than internationally acclaimed palaeoanthropologist Phillip Tobias, who has died at the age of 86 after a long illness.

But for Tobias’ endeavours, the honours would probably have gone to East Africa, the territory of the more famous Leakey team, Louis and Mary. The Leakeys were great self-publicists and they made sure that East African discoveries – especially those they made in the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya’s Rift Valley – featured prominently in international media at a time when South Africa was mostly renowned for its apartheid policies.

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However, Tobias, who was an anti-apartheid activist as well as a distinguished scientist, lived long enough to see the tide turn and South Africa take centre stage in the great debate on humanity’s origins. The huge shift in perceptions was largely Tobias’ doing. It was no mean feat to keep the torch alight for evolutionary studies in a land governed by white right-wing Christian fundamentalists who passionately dismissed the idea of evolution.

Tobias was a leader of the post-Second World War excavation of the Sterkfontein Caves, 30 miles north-west of Johannesburg, now a World Heritage site that has been officially titled the Cradle of Humankind. One-third of the world’s early hominid fossils finds have been unearthed at Sterkfontein, together with other fossilised creatures that lived alongside our ancestral apes.

Tobias was nominated three times for the Nobel Science Prize for his contributions to palaeoanthropology, but was never awarded it. Work at Sterkfontein, which first began 86 years ago, in 1994 yielded Little Foot, one of our oldest human ancestors found to date.

Little Foot was discovered as the cultural boycott of South Africa, over apartheid, was coming to an end and marked the swing back to South Africa as the “true” cradle of mankind. Tobias, despite his anti-apartheid campaigning, refused to leave South Africa even in the darkest days of apartheid.

Indeed, during the 1980s he had endured a subtle international campaign to downgrade the importance of South Africa’s fossil sites as a side-effect of world protests against apartheid.

While Tobias never poured scorn on the Leakeys’ work and “fossil chauvinism” – in fact, he worked in collaboration with them on several occasions – he was unshakeably confident of the immense importance of southern Africa’s hominid fossil discoveries.

Little Foot, carefully excavated with a dentists’ pick over a period of four years, is the almost complete skeleton and skull of a 4ft-tall hominid, estimated to be 4.17 million years old, which seems to have met its end after falling down a 45ft-deep hole.

Little Foot got its name from ankle joints and a prehensile big toe that suggested it was able to climb trees easily. Despite his confidence in mankind’s southern African origins, Tobias was not dogmatic: he conceded that there might be a pan-African origin of humankind, with our ancestors emerging from Africa and fanning out all over the globe.

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“There is no need for a sterile argument about whether humans started out in the east or south of the continent,” he once said. “The cradle of humankind was Africa.”

Tobias was born to Jewish parents who owned a toy shop in Durban that went bankrupt and left the family almost destitute. His parents divorced when he was young and his only sibling, a much loved sister named Valerie, died from diabetes at the age of 21.

Valerie’ death affected him so badly that he decided to study medicine at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, where he remained as student and teacher for the whole of his life.

In 1951 Tobias was appointed to a full-time lectureship in the department of anatomy at the university’s medical school. He went on to obtain doctorates in medicine, genetics and palaeoanthropology.

In 1953 he was a member of the scientific team who exposed as a forgery the Piltdown Man, a skull “discovered” in southern England in 1912 and promoted as the “missing link” between apes and humans.

Tobias and his colleagues established that Piltdown Man consisted of the lower jawbone of an orang-utan that had been skilfully combined with the skull of a modern man.

In 1956 Tobias established the Institute for the Study of Man at Witwatersrand University to advance the study of human ancestry and evolution.

Three years later he became Professor and head of the department of Anatomy and Human Biology, succeeding Raymond Dart, discoverer in 1924 of the then world-famous Taung Child Skull, which came to be widely regarded as the “missing link” between apes and humans. It was the first evidence that human evolution began in Africa.

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In 1961 Tobias gave a famous public lecture in which he argued that scientific truth about race rendered as nonsense South African government theories about racial genetic differences.

He had become president of the radical National Union of South African Students in 1948. The term “race”, he said, as argued by the apartheid-era government and others, is heavily charged emotionally and politically and full of unsound and dangerous meanings.

“It is in the name of ‘race’ that millions of people have been murdered and millions of others are being held in degradation,” he said.

However, he spoke out against the academic boycott of South Africa at Southampton in 1986 when the World Archaeological Congress decided to join in the blackballing of his country.

He argued that “isolating South African scholars would only result in our universities running down and down – and I couldn’t bear the thought of bequeathing a series of run-down universities to our post-apartheid successors.”

Tobias also loved cricket, music, books and theatre. He never married, describing himself as “married to my work, the medical school and the anatomy department [at the University of the Witwatersrand”. His students, he said, were his family.

FRED BRIDGLAND

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