¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

There is a joke making the rounds in academic circles on the subject
of Phillip Vallentine Tobias, winner of the first Leakey Foundation prize
for multidisciplinary research in ape and human evolution. The jest harks
back to one of his less distinguished but better known endeavours – as a
consultant to a television series that used the apeman costumes from the
film 2001: A Space Odyssey – and pairs it with one of his most recent accomplishments,
the publication of two weighty tomes, the definitive monograph on Homo habilis
from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania*.

Aficionados of 2001 will recall the opening sequence of the film, which
shows several apemen at Olduvai Gorge in the dim past. They eat, jabber,
gesticulate and eventually discover the use of primitive tools. Marking
this monumental accomplishment is the appearance of a mysterious, huge,
rectangular monolith that drops mysteriously from the sky.

At this point, as the joke goes, one apeman gestures to this massive
object and asks the other in some primeval language: ‘What is that thing?’
The other apeman chatters incomprehensibly in reply. The answer has long
been obscure. At last we are finally able to translate it: ‘Oh, it’s PVT’s
new monograph.’

It is a joke told in fondness but one that aptly reflects Tobias’s reputation
for long-windedness in written and spoken word and his thorough, exhaustive
attention to detail. He is a man of pedantic turn of mind, who relishes
anniversaries and calendrical coincidences, the sort of born teacher who
can rarely resist the impulse to enlighten, whatever the occasion and whoever
the audience might be. He is a private man with little private life (he
has never married), whose passions are tied up in public endeavours – his
work, his teaching and his fervent struggle against apartheid – and yet
who seems to mask his deepest emotions by resorting to the abstract pronoun
‘o²Ô±ð’.

Now retired head of the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology and
director of the Palaeoanthropology Research Unit at the University of the
Witwatersrand Medical School in South Africa, Tobias has had a lasting impact
on palaeoanthropology. He has also contributed to genetics, human biology
and the study of race.

But much more than this, he has used his national and international
prominence to speak out against apartheid and other government policies
in South Africa, sometimes at no small risk to himself.

The new Leakey prize rewards intellectual achievement and research in
fields bearing on human evolution. It honours an individual whose work has
transcended the boundaries of any single discipline, with a certificate,
a medal and $25 000. As Leslie Fox, executive director of the Leakey Foundation,
observes: ‘Professor Tobias’s research into human origins and his extraordinary
commitment to the dignity of man make him an outstanding recipient of the
first Leakey prize.’

This award caps a long and full life’s work. Tobias was born on 14 October
1925, in Durban, Natal, South Africa. ‘Do you know,’ he remarked characteristically
in a recent interview, ‘I have counted back and I believe I was conceived
on the night that the discovery of the Taung baby (the first australopithecine)
was published in Johannesburg?’

He was not an obvious candidate for a scientific life. His family background
was not academic; neither his English father nor his South African-born
mother had a university degree. Indeed, ‘I didn’t have a particularly happy
childhood,’ he confesses. ‘My family broke up when I was 12, and it hit
me rather hard.’ His parents’ divorce was followed by the bankruptcy of
his father’s business. Then, when Tobias was 16, his elder sister, Valarie,
died of diabetes.

Struggling with his sorrow, Tobias asked why his maternal grandmother
and sister were stricken with the disease while his mother was not. When
he found out that there was not a single medical geneticist in South Africa,
he resolved to become the first and to counsel the general public about
hereditary diseases.

After graduating at the top of his class, Tobias enrolled at the University
of the Witwatersrand to study medicine. At Wits, the popular name for the
university, he fell under the spell of several vibrant personalities who
interested him in their own field of research, physical anthropology. Foremost
among these was Raymond Dart, the flamboyant anatomist and discoverer of
Australopithecus africanus, the first primitive member of the human family,
or hominid, ever found.

Dart was one of Tobias’s mentors for his medical BSc. Although Dart
was recovering from a breakdown and gave very few lectures, those he delivered
were memorable. ‘One learnt absolutely no anatomy from him,’ Tobias chuckles.
‘One learnt about Dart. But one will never forget his antics – brachiating
from a pipe on the ceiling of an auditorium or crawling on a table as a
³¦°ù´Ç³¦´Ç»å¾±±ô±ð.’

Dart’s inspirational, charismatic qualities fired up many students,
Tobias included: ‘Dart recognised talent in people who hadn’t spotted it
in themselves yet; he was a maker of men, as we said then.’

Tobias started on the road to palaeoanthropology in 1945, while he was
still a student. After working with the palaeontologist Robert Broom in
the limestone caves at Sterkfontein and Kromdraai in Transvaal – both of
which had already yielded important specimens of Australopithecus – Tobias
organised an all-student party to investigate Makapansgat, another limestone
cave. They brought back some baboon skulls of singular importance and handed
them over to Dart.

This was an idiosyncratic decision not many people would have taken.
Tobias was deeply convinced, however, that fossils were Dart’s province,
even though Dart had done no research in palaeo-anthropology since shortly
after the academic world’s near-universal rejection of Australopithecus
in 1925. A baboon skull first drew Dart’s attention to the Taung deposits;
now, through Tobias’s keenness and kindness, these new baboon skulls lifted
Dart out of his depression (according to Dart’s autobiography) and spurred
him to return to palaeoanthropology, where he went on to make some of his
greatest contributions.

Fascinated as Tobias was by early hominids, he left them to Dart and
Broom, studying the chromosomes of the gerbil for his PhD. He soon accepted
a job teaching human anatomy at Wits, with Dart as his head of department,
and continued his studies in genetics. He also undertook a survey of the
biology of the San, or bushmen, in the Kalahari and later made similar studies
of Zambian Tonga people, mine workers, black farm children and Indian diabetics
in Natal, among other groups.

More important in retrospect were his political activities, begun a
few years before in 1948. The Nationalists came to power in South Africa
in the same year that Tobias became president of the nonracial National
Union of South African Students (NUSAS). When the government threatened
to impose apartheid on the universities, Tobias ‘was galvanised into fury’.
He organised a campaign protesting against this threat to the tremendously
valuable experience of nonracial education. Eventually, all the English
universities of South Africa joined the campaign, which helped to stave
off apartheid in university education for 11 years.

But in 1959, the Extension of University Education Act was passed. Tobias
fell into a profound melancholy that alternated with impotent rage; he considered
abandoning his homeland and his career in South Africa.

‘The rest is history,’ he said recently in a valedictory address at
Wits, ‘one stayed to fight on. For 25 years one played the biggest possible
part that one’s energy and time would allow, in keeping alive the belief
that it is the duty of the university to provide higher education for all
those who, in its opinion, can benefit from it, irrespective of race or
colour; and the principle of freedom of the academy in a free society.’

He led the fight through innumerable university bodies, such as the
Lecturers’ Association, the Senate and the Council, and worked against apartheid
with the Education League of South Africa, the New Education Fellowship,
the Institute of Citizenship, the Open Universities’ Liaison Committee and
the National Educational Union of South Africa.

It was not a comfortable choice. His political stance provoked unwelcome
visits from the Special Branch, and, from time to time, there were hints
that his research funding was at risk. The worst moment came while he was
away in the Kalahari studying the San; the Special Branch took advantage
of his absence to interrogate and intimidate his 70-year-old father. Tobias
drew up contingency plans to flee the country, hoping that if he were forced
to leave he could take up an offer from an American university; he alerted
his secretary to notify the university officials if he suddenly disappeared.
These plans proved unnecessary. Years later, in 1984 and 1986, the restrictions
on the admission of students of colour – Asians, Africans and people of
mixed descent – to the universities were finally lifted.

After publishing extensively on genetics, setting up a counselling service
on hereditary diseases and conducting extensive surveys of human biology,
Tobias embarked on the palaeoanthropological research for which he is best
known. He reopened excavations at the famous hominid site of Sterkfontein
(which had been closed since John Robinson, Broom’s protege, left for the
US), finding some important hominid specimens in the process. But Tobias’s
eminence does not derive from particular discoveries or particular theories;
it is rather his ubiquity, his involvement at a primary level with so many
of the most important fossil hominids.

Tobias was attracted to palaeoanthropology by Louis and Mary Leakey,
who in 1959 asked him to describe the spectacular cranium of ‘Zinjanthropus’
(Australopithecus boisei, in modern terminology) just discovered at Olduvai
Gorge. Their lifelong collaboration gave Tobias access to the Olduvai hominid
fossils and culminated in the recent hefty monograph.

But this collaboration also sucked Tobias into a whirlwind of controversy
with which his name and career are closely associated. It was an intriguing
episode that took 25 years to resolve, with ironic parallels to the scepticism
levelled at Dart over the hominid status of A. africanus.

After the discovery of the ‘Zinj’ specimen in 1959, Olduvai produced
so many other specimens in such rapid succession that John Napier, a specialist
in postcranial anatomy, was brought in to help Tobias to describe the material.
By 1964, the team was persuaded that there were two species of hominid present
in the ancient beds at Olduvai.

Their conviction was announced on 4 April 1964, in a classic article
in Nature entitled ‘A new species of the genus Homo from Olduvai Gorge’.
As with Dart’s naming of Australopithecus, the avalanche of challenges began
to bury the new species as fast as the words could be typeset.

H. habilis or ‘handy man’ (a name suggested by Dart) proved controversial
in several ways. Few found the new specimens convincingly distinct from
Australopithecus; the feeling seemed to be that what was wanted was one
complete skull. The trio were overtly accused of sloppiness, of failing
to carry out detailed comparisons with known hominid fossils and publishing
on the basis of insufficient analyses.

Why this charge was raised is an interesting question. Part of the problem
may have been Leakey’s reputation for rashly coining new scientific names
for his specimens. Part of it may also have been Tobias’s association with
Dart, whose publications on early hominids featured dramatic, purple prose
that made him seem unreliable. Another factor may have been Leakey’s annoying
habit of turning up four or five new specimens every year that had to be
made sense of.

A more basic focus of objection was that the team used a behavioural
criterion – what they preferred to see as perfectly acceptable ethological
evidence – to support their diagnosis of the specimens as Homo. Believing
tools to be the hallmark of man, they reversed Leakey’s previous assertion
that Australopithecus made the tools at Olduvai and deduced that H. habilis
was the toolmaker, hence the name. But the ease with which the identity
of the toolmaker was reassigned underscored the central point: it is impossible
to tell who made the tools. This inherent uncertainty made toolmaking contentious
as supporting evidence.

Tobias believes that the fundamental issue was that the new species
jarred the existing paradigm. Many scholars felt there was insufficient
morphological ‘room’ between Australopithecus and Homo erectus to accommodate
another taxon. There was also a theoretical problem with the existence of
two hominids living side by side at Olduvai, because it was widely believed
that only one human ancestor existed at a time. Still more suspicious, to
the cynic, was the fact that the team had been obliged to revise the definition
of Homo, decreasing the minimum size of brain for it to qualify as a new
specimen of the genus.

Yet time, and additional specimens, have a way of shifting paradigms
by slow degrees, even ones that have been resistant to violent shoves. By
1980, a textbook – naturally a good measure of the mainstream opinion in
any field – declared: ‘H. habilis is a taxon whose time has come.’ (Milford
Wolpoff in Paleoanthropology, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1980.) Eleven
years later, the acceptance of the taxon has been carved in stone with the
near-simultaneous publication of the H. habilis monograph and the awarding
of the Leakey prize to Tobias, the only surviving namer of the taxon.

Having spent so many years studying and defending H. habilis Tobias
might be expected to savour this victory gleefully. And yet, asked to sum
up his life’s work, it is of teaching that Tobias speaks: ‘I suppose I’m
one of these curious academics who loves his students,’ he says.

Pat Shipman is a freelance science writer based in Maryland.

*Phillip V. Tobias, 1991, Olduvai Gorge, Volume 4. The Skulls, Endocasts
and Teeth of Homo habilis. Cambridge University Press, 2 vols., pp 921).