The death of Phillip Vallentine Tobias on 7 June 2012 marked the end of an era of pioneering palaeoanthropology in Africa. His 86 years spanned the period beginning with the 1925 announcement by Raymond Dart of the first known Australopithecus from Taung and extended through the ever-accumulating inventory of hundreds of fossils of many species belonging to Australopithecus, Paranthropus and early Homo. These came not only from South Africa, but also from Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Malawi and Chad. So much has been learnt during those 86 years about human origins and diversity, about palaeoenvironments, taphonomy, primate behaviour, dating of fossils, and cultural evolution. Phillip was a key personality involved in these developments, whether as researcher, teacher, thesis supervisor, facilitator, publicist or supportive and enthusiastic colleague.
Phillip was born in Durban on 14 October 1925 to Joseph Newman Tobias, originally of Portsea, England and Fanny, née Rosendorff, of Edenburg in the Orange Free State. He had one sibling, Valerie Pearl, who was born on 1 January 1921. Constant tensions between Phillip's parents, which culminated in their divorce when he was 12 years old, depressed and distressed him throughout his childhood. This unhappy home life was compounded by a serious accident that he suffered at the age of nine. Trapped between floors in an old fashioned lift and trying to extricate himself, he was badly injured when the lift began to move and he was hospitalized for three months with a broken leg, partly severed Achilles tendon and scalp wounds. The details are recounted in his autobiography, Into the Past. In spite of his unhappy home life, Phillip was a diligent scholar at Durban Prep School, where he developed a love for writing. In 1935, Phillip and Val were sent to live with his mother's youngest sister and family, the Posners, in Bloemfontein. Val went to the Eunice Institute Girls’ School, and Phillip first attended the dual medium (Afrikaans and English) President Brand School, where he was fascinated by nature study. His following two years were spent at the St Andrews’ School, where he helped start a class newspaper of which he was the editor. He also played parts in two local dramatic productions. It is clear that Phillip's well known passion for the correct and eloquent usage of the English language and his love of words, reading, writing, editing and oratory developed during his school days. Those of us who wrote theses under Phillip's supervision derived great benefit from his meticulous and incisive red-pen comments that would pepper the text and margins. It was also in 1937 Bloemfontein that Phillip developed an interest in human anatomy from his hygiene and nature study classes. Meanwhile, far away in the Sterkfontein caves near Krugersdorp, Dr Robert Broom was making discoveries of the first adult Australopithecus fossils—ape-like human ancestors that would much later lead to Phillip's own involvement in palaeoanthropological researches at those caves.
Figure 1. Three Makapanians at a function in the Anatomy Department of the University of the Witwatersrand in the mid-1970s. From left: Raymond Dart, Alun Hughes and Phillip Tobias.
In 1939, Phillip was back in Durban, enrolled at Durban High School and living in the Westville suburb with his mother and his step-father, Bert Norden. As he often had to wait long hours after school for a bus or for a lift home from Bert, he regularly spent that time studying exhibits in the Durban Natural History Museum. Of special interest to him was an exhibit on genetics and heredity. Another of his favourite exhibits was on the varieties of South African animals, with their species and common names as well as ecological information. He was intrigued also by an archaeological display and all of these exhibits, together with his time spent in the municipal library, helped to shape his future career path. When he was 16 years old and in his matric year, Phillip's life was yet again traumatized when his sister Val died from diabetes at the age of 21. Upon learning that her diabetes was genetic, Phillip determined that he would become a medical geneticist and eventually his BSc project and his PhD research were indeed both in genetics.
Phillip excelled in his matric and was readily accepted at the age of 17 to study medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand. He had chosen Johannesburg in order to be close to his father. He obtained his BSc in 1946, BSc Honours 1947, MBBCh 1950, PhD 1953 and DSc 1967. His PhD thesis was in cytogenetics and was entitled ‘Chromosomes, sex-cells and evolution in a mammal’. This was later published as a book in 1956 and was the first of a multitude of publications which Phillip would produce in his lifetime (over 1100 publications, including 33 books). It was in early 1944 as a second-year medical student that Phillip first entered the Anatomy Department, headed at that time by Professor Raymond Arthur Dart, a dynamic, eccentric man whose very presence struck awe into the students in the dissection hall, but who at the same time inspired them to excel in their chosen professions. Thus Phillip could not fail but be impressed by Dart's energy, dramatic enthusiasm and written and vocal expertise with the English language. Almost half a century later he wrote that, looking back, he had no doubt whatever that Dart was the biggest single influence in his life. As Phillip also exhibited these qualities but in his own style, it placed him in a strong position to eventually inherit Dart's mantle as head of the Anatomy Department in 1959.
In June 1951, Professor Dart recommended that Phillip, representing Wits University, should join the French Panhard Capricorn Expedition that was crossing southern Africa. Phillip's role would be as team doctor and physical anthropologist, with a particular aim to study Bushmen of the Kalahari, taking anthropometric data and making face masks. This was to be Phillip's introduction to Bushman studies, which would absorb him for more than 20 years and would see him write a series of articles on them in the French journal L'Anthropologie and the English journal Man as well as in a book that he edited entitled The Bushmen. He also chaired the Kalahari Research Committee that between 1956 and 1971 was responsible for many Bushman studies. The story of the Panhard-Capricorn expedition is related in a book called Capricorn Road, by the expedition leader Francois Balsan. Balsan's description of Phillip making plaster face moulds of Bushmen rings true to those of us familiar with his speaking ability. “I am convinced that only the skill (both operational and psychological) of Tobias could have managed it successfully. He worked wonders, as much with his tongue as with his fingers.” He concludes with “and still my dear Tobias kept on talking, talking … until the heat had dried out the plaster into a shell and his work was finished.” As an indication of Phillip's interest in archaeology, Balsan elsewhere recounts how Tobias, after making collections of stone tools and geological specimens “got Karumba to bring him an assortment of boxes and bags and displayed their contents for our admiration—scraper, arrowhead, Chellean picks. He was also very proud of an assortment of crude topaz and blue tourmelines. As he showed us his trophies, he talked to us of the prehistoric Nosop, its importance to the field of human studies.” In another part of his book he writes that “Tobias asked me if he could go and look at the stones in the area. Night fell and still Tobias had not returned. I set off to look for him, flashing my torch, and found him staggering back bent almost double under the weight of the ancient stone implements he had found.”
In 1957, Phillip was invited by Desmond Clark and H.A. Fosbrooke to be involved in the Gwembe Valley Survey of the Plateau Tonga of what was then Northern Rhodesia. Their land was to be flooded by the Kariba Dam and some 54,000 people would be affected. As a member of the survey, Phillip was responsible for studies of physical anthropology.
Throughout his life, Phillip was interested in human physical and cultural variety but vociferous in his condemnation of any concepts of racial superiority. Thus he was appalled by the racially repressive and segregationist policies imposed by the Nationalist government after it came to power in 1948. Their policy of racial grouping and white supremacy with its attendant enforced segregation, displacement of people from their home areas into racially defined townships and other brutal treatment was a painful echo of the evils of Nazi Germany that had been brought to an end only three years before. How was it possible that once again an ideology of supremacy based on racial classification could be imposed on people? In concert with so many of his fellow South Africans, Phillip would not stand idly by. That same year, Phillip became president of the National Union of South Africa Students (NUSAS), and in that capacity and later as Head of the Anatomy Department, he campaigned vigorously against racial prejudice, oppression and segregation, including segregation of the universities.
Phillip never became a medical practitioner but his intense dedication to the subject and the education of medical students was one of the reasons for which he was appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences in 1980. As a multi-facetted scientist, Phillip made extensive intellectual contributions to many disciplines. Yet it was anatomy that was his first love. He wrote a number of anatomical textbooks, including, with Toby Arnold, the human anatomy dissection manual entitled Man's Anatomy. Thousands of Tobias’ past students will probably still have a somewhat dog-eared, formalin-enriched copy of this manual somewhere on their bookshelf. His love for anatomy, for the structure of the human body, was limitless. His fascination with the intricacies of morphology and function was inspiring, and his enthusiasm for the subject rousing. Most medical and allied health students who passed through the lecture halls of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits remember Phillip as a motivating and exciting lecturer. Such was his skill that he was able to transform a difficult ‘dead’ subject into one that ‘lived’. Each year, students and staff members were instructed in somatotyping (body form) and also in functional morphology. Over the years, Phillip developed these demonstrations into a public lecture entitled ‘The Anatomy of Poise and Skill’. Utilising the muscular bulk and posing of a body builder, the movements of karate-ka's, the voice of a soprano and the pirouetting of ballerinas, he illustrated the complex yet fascinating structure and function of the human body. His contributions to anatomy were not only in his own beloved Department of Anatomy at Wits, for his love of the study of anatomy transcended departmental boundaries. So it was that Phillip was responsible for initiating discussions around the setting up of a society for anatomists in South Africa. In 1968, the Anatomical Society of Southern Africa, born through Phillip's efforts, was established. Tobias was one of its Founder Members and also its first President. His fascination for language, coupled with his devotion to anatomy, resulted in his being an integral part of the terminology committee of the International Federation of Anatomical Associations.
Although small in stature, Phillip was larger than life. A few years ago he was the star of a television documentary entitled ‘Tobias’ Bodies’. In one scene, Phillip in his clinical white coat is standing in front of a row of assorted stark naked men and women but examining and pontificating on their teeth! In another scene, seated in front of Phillip's desk, palaeoanthropologist Tim White tells him of the 4.4 million-year-old date for the Ethiopian hominid Ardipithecus. The astonished Phillip says, ‘How old?!’ And when Tim repeats the age, Phillip displays dramatic astonishment and gasps, ‘Bring me a cup of tea!” These scenes and many others in the film really do embody the essential Phillip Tobias, clinical, focused, master of the dramatic, and forever stimulating his thoughts with a cup of tea. Phillip Tobias helped to shape the minds of many embryonic great academics and professionals. He leaves behind a legacy of hundreds of his ‘children’, as he liked to refer to them, who populate many institutions and health care facilities around the world.
The Anatomy Department, first in the old Medical School in Hospital Hill, Hillbrow and then in its present location in Parktown, became Phillip's spiritual home. His time was spent in research, lecturing, supervising research students, writing for publications, letter writing (he had a prodigious correspondence), staff meetings, seminars, university matters, meeting and talking to visitors, and selecting slides for his lectures both local and overseas. He regularly travelled to various destinations around the world to attend conferences, conduct research, present talks and receive a multiplicity of honours and awards. He never married or had any companion but was well looked after by his loyal household staff. His home life was spent also in reading and writing, although he did enjoy listening to music, attending to his stamp collection, watching the news and cricket matches, and relaxing with a cup of tea. He was an avid reader of newspapers, in particular The Rand Daily Mail and The Star. Any article about him would be clipped out and his research assistant would paste the cutting into a large scrapbook. There are now over 50 of these scrapbooks. He also liked to attend theatre productions, concerts and public lectures, such as those of the Archaeological Society. He wrote in his autobiography that he was once unofficially engaged to a lady he refers to as Ruth K. and that he took her to Durban to meet his mother and stepfather, who, to his dismay, tried to break off the relationship. Phillip himself realizing that she wanted to marry soon and that he had no money and still several years of medical and PhD studies did break off the informal engagement. He says that the relationship had so shaken him that for the first time that year his exam results were below his usual standard. So, for the rest of his life, he remained single, absorbed in his work and university related functions. It was not uncommon for staff to receive a phone call from him even late in the evening with a question he had or to expound at length on a forthcoming visit of some eminent professor. After beginning with “I hope I didn't wake you, old thing?” (or “old chap,” “old bean,” or for female staff “my dear”), he would launch into detailed instructions on all that must be done, interspersed with snippets from the eminent visitor's life history. He was gregarious and enjoyed the company of active minds. Thus he invited many staff and research students to join him and other guests on occasion for meals, usually at the Gramadoulas Restaurant which for many years was situated beneath his apartment in Hillbrow.
As Head of Department, he was disciplined, exacting, very well organized and attentive to the finest detail. This was well exemplified when he organized two very successful international conferences, The Taung Diamond Jubilee in 1985 and The Dual Congress of the International Association of Human Biologists and the International Association of Human Palaeontology in 1998. Students and staff had always to wear clean white lab coats, attend all guest lectures and seminars whether the subject interested them or not, attend the regular Tuesday lunch club talks, always have a notepad and pen and diary when summoned to his office, and always respond promptly to his frequent notes which were written in blue fountain pen ink on recycled scraps of paper in recycled envelopes. Woe betide you if you did not date your response or if you made a spelling or grammatical error. Furthermore, he had to be addressed, even by senior colleagues as ‘Professor’. He was always smartly dressed, with highly polished shoes, and was forever changing his hair style, whilst sometimes sporting a beard, sometimes a moustache and no beard, and sometimes clean shaven.
So productive was Phillip in terms of publications and letters and so demanding were departmental matters that at one stage he had two secretaries and a research assistant, as well as other occasional secretaries. As he had at various times been given bronze busts of himself, he had these placed prominently in each of their offices. In this way, he was seemingly ever present even in absentia.
He built up the Hunterian Museum in the department to become an excellent teaching and research facility. The museum was curated at one time by John Tshabalala and later by Peter Faugust, and both of them rigidly adhered to Phillip's insistence that records must be kept of each item temporarily removed, whether it be a primate skeleton, fossil hominid cast, anatomical model or slides for a lecture. Thus the collections were very well maintained and available year after year to students and staff. In the new Medical School, one section of the museum housed displays on anatomical specimens for the benefit of student studies, and on the wall opposite was a magnificent display of face masks of people from all over Africa. There were even some face masks of science students which were made by the students as part of their training under the tutelage of Roley Klomfass. This section of the museum was often the focal point for Anatomy social functions. Another focal point was the Anatomy Department library and common room, where at tea time each morning and afternoon, staff and research students gathered around a very long table for tea or coffee and even cakes if it was somebody's birthday. These were opportunities for people to communicate – something that Phillip considered important to the smooth running of his department. In this common room also Phillip would preside over staff meetings which could be very lengthy as he dealt with departmental matters in precise detail. Here too were held the regular Tuesday lunch club meetings given on all kinds of subjects by invited speakers, whether visitors to the department, staff members or research students. Phillip invariably introduced them, thanked them at the end, and asked most questions and delivered lengthy comments. During the talk he would partake of his frugal lunch, including lettuce leaves, from an antiquated blue-lidded tin lunch box.
Another of Phillip's great passions was the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa (ISMA). This was established to commemorate Professor Dart and his work on his retirement at the end of 1958. The concept was first proposed by Dr L.F. Freed in 1956 and enthusiastically supported by Dart's colleagues, associates and students, including of course Phillip. After it came into being, the Institute was based in and flourished in Phillip's Anatomy Department. ISMA embodied everything about Africa that had interested Dart and also Phillip. These subjects included the living and ancient peoples of Africa, the story of development of humans from ape-man to modern man, evolution, palaeoenvironments, archaeology, physical anthropology and human variation, cultural diversity, social structures, diet and dental development, health and disease, and geographic adaptations and language. It is sad indeed that this excellent living memorial to Dart's work ceased to exist several years ago.
As a man who so often noted significance and coincidence in anniversaries, Phillip would have been intrigued by the fact that he died exactly 100 years after the discovery of the major portions of the Piltdown skull, i.e. pieces of the parietal and the partial mandible. These were announced as an early human ancestor with a large brain and ape-like jaw. The significant link is that, whereas Piltdown was, after 40 years, shown to be a forgery, Phillip was part of a team (including L.S.B. Leakey and J. Napier) that in 1964 announced parietal bones and a partial mandible from Olduvai as a real, relatively large-brained early human ancestor, Homo habilis. Another symbolic coincidence which Phillip liked to point out was that he was born in 1925, the year of the announcement of the Taung child skull of Australopithecus. He was destined to form strong links with this skull during his lifetime, first as a student and protégé of Raymond Dart (discoverer of the skull), and secondly as custodian when he inherited from Dart the headship of the Anatomy Department of Wits Medical School. Phillip was in his element when he was able to talk at length about the history, the anatomy and the impact of the Taung skull. In addition to his contributions to human biology and human rights, Phillip was well known as a palaeoanthropologist. However, in one of his publications he referred to himself as a “reluctant palaeoanthropologist,” thus echoing Dart's published description of himself as a “reluctant anthropologist”. If these two professors were indeed initially reluctant because of their other career interests in the medical sciences, they certainly were to become enthusiastic researchers, teachers and publishers of anthropology and palaeoanthropology.
In 1959, Raymond Dart with Dennis Craig published a fascinating book entitled Adventures with the Missing Link, wherein he included a photo of the 19-year-old Phillip Tobias taken in 1945. Dart recounts how, in that year, Phillip led a student expedition to Makapansgat and thereafter encouraged Dart to begin looking for fossils there. The subsequent work by the Kitching brothers and Alun Hughes produced thousands of animal fossils and also a new species of ape-man that Dart named Australopithecus prometheus. It was not until 1955 that Phillip became directly involved in palaeoanthropological studies during a Nuffield Fellowship at Cambridge University in England. After examining fossil hominids in the British Museum, he decided to make a detailed study of the Kanam mandible fragment that had been found by Louis Leakey in 1932. Much controversy had surrounded Leakey's interpretation of that jaw as an Early Pleistocene fossil of Homo. Phillip's study clarified the anatomy and pathology of the specimen and added some support to Leakey's claims. In 1959, Phillip presented his paper at the IVth Pan African Congress of Prehistory in Leopoldville (now Kinshasha). Louis and Mary Leakey were there to present their newly discovered Zinjanthropus cranium from Olduvai Gorge and were so impressed with Phillip's Kanam paper that they invited him to conduct the detailed description and analysis of Zinjanthropus. This was a turning point in his career, as his magnificent work on the skull thrust him into the forefront of palaeoanthropology and was followed by his equally splendid two volume work on Homo habilis from Olduvai Gorge.
In 1966, Phillip and Alun Hughes opened full-time excavations at Sterkfontein caves, which were extremely productive of fossil animals, hominids and stone tools, and which are still continuing today, 46 years later. In 1977, he formed within his department the Palaeoanthropology Research Programme that eventually became a Group and then a Unit. This attracted students and researchers from all over the world and Wits Medical School became internationally famous as a centre for palaeoanthropological research. There was also an active casting facility providing casts, not only for research but also for sale and exchange with museums and universities around the globe, and a photographic studio and darkroom that provided for the needs of staff, students and visiting researchers. One whole room was devoted to Phillip's vast reprint collection that was readily available by arrangement to research students. Phillip's personal library was housed partly in a room adjoining his office and partly in his flat. He even purchased an extra flat in his Hillbrow block just to house his book collection. He was a mine of information and could provide even obscure references in response to enquiries from students and researchers. He had a very sharp memory for people, names and events of the past. Each year he would have his departmental photographer produce small portrait photos of the new intake of second year students. These some 200 portraits would be affixed to boards placed in his office so that he could memorise names with faces. He enjoyed talking to his students about palaeoanthropology and encouraged their interest through an annual excursion to Sterkfontein, Swartkrans and Kromdraai, after which he would often be hoarse from talking and have to resort to his favourite throat lozenges. His Science students he took for a few days of fieldwork to Makapansgat, where at night under a sparkling canopy of stars they joined him in discussions other than palaeoanthropology. Discussions on the origins of the stars, philosophy of science, and the occasional limerick enchanted the students and made them long to return to the site.
Phillip Tobias forged links with many people all over the world who were involved in genetics, anatomy, human biology and palaeoanthropology. His office walls were a veritable picture gallery, festooned with photographs of acquaintances and with his many awards and honours. So many were his honours that in recent years his letterhead with titles and honorary degrees after his name took up nearly half the page! Phillip could tell stories about each of the people in the photographs and would reminisce about his encounters with them. He was a gifted raconteur and whether you attended his lectures or were sitting in his office with a cup of tea his tales of adventures in anthropology would never fail to entertain. These were indeed adventures with a – now sadly missing – link to the past.
R.J. Clarke
Reader in Palaeoanthropology
Institute for Human Evolution
University of the Witwatersrand
Beverley Kramer
Assistant Dean: Research & Postgraduate Support
Faculty of Health Sciences
University of the Witwatersrand