Science icon leaves a key to our future

Professor Phillip Tobias, a leading South African palaeo-anthropologist and one of our country's most decorated scientists, died in June after a long illness. He was 86 years old.

According to the Gauteng Tourism Authority (GTA), he was a "leading South African academic and scientist who shared a lifelong passion for the study of man and human ancestry with his colleagues at Wits University and the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site".

Professor Tobias made time to talk to the media and to interact with his students.		Professor Phillip Tobias identified, described and named the new species Homo habilis.

Tobias started the current programme of excavation at the Sterkfontein caves in 1966. This excavation is now the longest continuously active palaeo-anthropological dig anywhere in the world, and has produced over 1 000 hominin fossils.

"In addition, tens of thousands of fossils of animals which lived contemporaneously with human ancestors have been excavated, processed, described, analysed and classified," said the GTA.

In an interview for a SAASTA publication some time ago, Tobias shared some of his wisdom with our readers:

On the Durban Natural History Museum

"When I was at school in Durban we lived in Westville, outside the city on the main road to the hinterland and there were only a few buses daily. When I finished school at two o'clock, I would have to sit and wait for a couple of hours for the five o'clock bus. The bus station was near the Durban City Hall where the Durban Natural History Museum was. I spent hours in the museum and three items fascinated me - all relevant to my subsequent career.

"The museum had a wonderful collection of stuffed animals, beautifully presented. I came to wonder about what we call biodiversity today. The term was not known in those days. The huge diversity of Africa's animals fascinated me.

"Secondly, the enlightened museum curator, Mr E C Chubb, had a very interesting exhibit on genetics. This showed how with mealies - corn on the cob - you sometimes got all yellow ones, and sometimes ones with dark blue seeds, and sometimes a mixture of the two. The museum explained how these colours were inherited. They also had an exhibit on human eye colour - a whole collection of blue and green and brown eyeballs - showing what your eyes would look like if your mother's eyes were blue and your fathers eyes brown, for example. That human genetics exhibit was absolutely grist to my mill just at the time when my late sister was dying of diabetes and I was wondering how this illness could be inherited.

"The third thing in that museum that I would always be grateful for was an archaeological exhibit. At school we were taught nothing about fossils and stone tools, but at the museum there was an exhibit based on a cave which the curator himself had excavated with two colleagues at the mouth of a river in the south of KwaZulu-Natal. Right near the river, so there was lots of fresh water to drink, was this cave with thousands of instruments. The exhibits the curator made in the museum were a child's guide to archaeology, answering many of the obvious questions a thinking child would ask. What is a stone tool? What is it made of? Who made them? What were they used for? When were they made? How long ago? I took down that entire exhibit in my notebook; I filled a whole exercise book. I even thought I had found some stone tools near my stepfather's tennis court, which later turned out to be natural objects of weathering. You have to make mistakes if you want to learn!"

Genetics, biodiversity and prehistory

"I have always been grateful to that museum and the time I could spend there at a very formative stage in my career. When the museum heard me saying this 10 - 15 years ago they were so thrilled to think that their museum had played a major role in my development. They made me write it up and put it in their magazine and they sent it to the city council at a stage when the council said they could not afford museums.

"I did not get anything of this kind from my family. Indeed I was the first one from my family to go to university. My parents never had a higher education."

What kept him motivated?

"The sheer fascination of discoveries and the excitement of new methods and techniques for dating the past. Who would ever have thought that we would one day know that the Taung child had lived 2.5 million years ago? They used to say, but that was sheer guesswork, that it was a million years ago."

Is there still a lot to be discovered? Is the field still wide open for youngsters who want to study in your field?

"South Africa is perhaps the richest or one of the richest countries in the world for remains of the past. If your eyes are open, you cannot walk for 20 minutes in the veld anywhere without kicking over something - a little piece of prehistoric pottery, a little metal spear point, an assegai point which goes back to the early arrival of the Bantu speaking blacks in South Africa a couple of thousand years ago. Or stone tools before the Iron Age.

"I was walking over the Houghton golf course one day - I am not a much of a golfer, but I was taking a walk because there is quite a deep donga that crosses the golf course. When you have a donga, nature has done an excavation for you - it has dug down through the layers of soil into the past. And so I went and had a look to see what was in the side walls of the donga, because if you look that much below the surface you look at perhaps a thousand years ago, five thousand years ago, and if you look a little lower maybe you are looking at 25 000 years ago. And there I found a magnificent hand axe - a very ancient kind of stone tool - going back to perhaps a quarter of a million years. It was a beautiful manifestation of this kind of culture of which one encounters artefacts all over South Africa, especially along the walls of the Vaal River.

"So even just taking a stroll along a donga in the middle of the biggest city in our country, there is a hand axe talking to you. It was very, very exciting. I think South African children must keep their eyes and minds open to see what they can find. Maybe children living on a farm know of rock paintings or rock engravings, maybe there are some of these tools, or perhaps there are some footprints that have been carved in the rock. It is a very rich country for anyone whose eyes and mind are open."

Why is it good to know about the past?

"I think everybody wants to know where he/she has come from. It is a question of getting the feel of your roots, your ancestors, where and how long ago you have originated. It may be also that we can get an idea of where we are going to ... if we can see where we come from. If we could take the events of yesterday - the long yesterday - and draw graphs out of the past up to the present, maybe we would have a basis for extrapolating them into the future to get an idea of where are we going from here.

"Many people are asking today what the future of man is, and believe it or not, they come along to people like myself to ask if the past of mankind has any relevance for looking at and deciphering the future. I believe very firmly that it does have.

"I think we are not changing very much in our anatomy. If I showed you some of the people who lived 100 000 years ago and put them into a tunic and a shirt and a jersey on Eloff Street or Church Square, you would not look twice. For 100 000 years we have hardly changed anatomically.

"But our minds have changed and our behaviour has changed and I think that that is one of the clues or keys to the future."