Phillip Tobias grew up reading comic books in which cave men always were portrayed the same: brutish and stooped, their fangs dripping gore, but with big brains that crucially made them human.
“They had the spark divine in their heads, but they were bent over in appallingly bad posture,” the white-haired doyen of South African paleoanthropology said with a chuckle. “That was the view then, that we became human in our brains before we became human in our posture and our teeth.”
Scientists today know the reverse is true–just one of the revolutions that continue to reshape our view of how our ancestors evolved.
Humans’ ancestors, it now appears, were living in forests when they started walking upright, not the savannas where experts long surmised they needed to stand to see over the tall grass. They split from chimpanzee ancestors at least 10 million years ago and not the 5 million to 7 million years ago long believed, new molecular data show. And the earliest ancestors of humans, fossils suggest, may not have come from Africa after all, but from parts of southeastern Europe.
That almost every basic hypothesis of human origins has been overturned at least once during his lifetime doesn’t bother Tobias in the least–a rare perspective for a man turning 80 this year.
“We have to swallow hard and open our minds,” he said recently. “I’ve always loved changes of paradigm, and we are living on the brink of big ones at this moment. I’m very excited. I don’t think we’re 50 percent of the way toward resolving the outstanding questions of human origins.”
Anyone who clings to old ideas, particularly in his field, “is rapidly on the way to cerebral fossilization,” he warns.
Tobias, a still spry and witty anatomist and geneticist, and South Africa’s leading bone man, is anything but a fossil.
Grudgingly semiretired, he still shows up for work most days to his office crammed with books and skull casts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He’s working on the second volume of his autobiography, and he still turns out more than a dozen scientific papers a year.
Until December he ran the longest continuous hominid fossil dig in the world, at Sterkfontein cave, and recently he was the star of his own popular South African television series, “Tobias’ Bodies,” examining everything from the evolutionary effects of cooking to male aggression.
Perhaps even more impressive for someone of his age and profession, Tobias’ focus remains as much on modern life–and the future–as the past.
The Vatican has called him in to consult on the growing split between believers with faith in science and biblical literalists who reject the idea of evolution.
A longtime anti-apartheid campaigner who became president of the Witwatersrand student union in 1948, the year South Africa’s apartheid government took power, he maintains a keen interest in U.S. controversies over genetic differences between races and sexes. And the three-time Nobel Prize nominee has some interesting ideas about what evolution might bring humankind in the future.
As a reviewer of Tobias’ television series on genetics and evolution put it, for an old man with a hip replacement, he remains impressively hip.
“I see myself as not having lost my sense of wonderment,” Tobias said, peering around heaps of papers stacked on his huge wooden desk. “I’m still eager and excited.”
The aging scholar and mystery novel fan, still one of the world’s leading paleoanthropologists, never meant to have anything to do with bones. Growing up in Durban, on South Africa’s coast, he puzzled as a teenager over how diabetes could have claimed the life of his only sibling, an older sister, and afflicted his grandmother without showing up in his mother. He decided he would become a doctor and figure it out.
During his years studying anatomy in medical school at Witwatersrand University, however, he found himself inescapably drawn to a relatively new field: paleoanthropology.
In 1924, a year before Tobias was born, Witwatersrand professor Raymond Dart had come upon one of the world’s first-discovered prehuman skulls, the misshapen Taung child, blasted from a South African limestone quarry. By the time Tobias was in school, South Africa–and Witwatersrand University in particular–was becoming one of the key centers of the paleoanthropological world, and scientists worldwide were slowly coming to terms with the idea that humans might have evolved in Africa rather than Europe.
“The whole department was steeped in the atmosphere of our ancestors,” Tobias recalled. “Somewhere in this vast building the Taung child was to be found. That drew me into anthropology.”
By 1959, the year Mary and Louis Leakey found their first human ancestor at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Tobias–now a professor–succeeded Dart as the head of the university’s school of anatomy. The soon-to-be-famous East African paleoanthropologists and the young star anatomist quickly established a long friendship, with Tobias flying repeatedly to Nairobi, Kenya, to help examine and describe a growing trove of prehuman fossils.
The finds–all with the unexpectedly small brains that matched that of the Taung child–turned Tobias into a fossil brain specialist and an early believer that human evolution might well have happened not just in South Africa or Tanzania but all across the continent.
“I thought, `If they were in Tanzania, why not Kenya?’ And of course before long, we knew they were. And there they were in Ethiopia, and not long after that in Chad. It became useless to ask where the cradle of mankind was. The only answer was Africa.”
Since that time, a profusion of ever-earlier prehuman finds has turned up, pushing the human divergence with apes–once thought to be 100,000 years ago–further and further into the past.
With the split now calculated at more than 10 million years ago, fossils from Turkey, Macedonia and Hungary, once dismissed as too early to fall in the human line, are controversially being reconsidered for membership. While most scientists believe hominids evolved into modern humans in Africa, the human ancestors’ own ancestors may have come from Europe.
“The fundamentals are changing,” Tobias said. “There’s been a quantum leap forward just since this century started.”
Tenacious and productive
Among colleagues, Tobias–never married and a self-confessed workaholic–is perhaps best known for his courtliness, his tenacity and, particularly, his prodigious writings. The first volume of his autobiography, still in the publisher’s hands, is being cut from 40 chapters, and that only reaches the midpoint of his life. His annual Christmas letter runs 10 pages, colleagues say. Over the years he has turned out a stunning 1,140 articles, books and other publications.
“I knew of few scholars like him,” said Alan Morris, an anatomist and former student of Tobias’ now at the University of Cape Town. “I’m 55 and I’m pushing 100 publications. There isn’t enough time for me to catch up to the man.”
Like most paleoanthropologists, Tobias has attracted plenty of criticism over the years, particularly from colleagues who dismiss his contention that some fossil skulls, etched with brain structures inside, indicate whether their owners could speak.
But even his detractors don’t dispute his vast knowledge.
“He’s one of those superb anatomists who are very much going out of style, I fear,” said Russell Tuttle, a University of Chicago anatomist who counts himself as both friend and critic of Tobias.
Ten years after the end of apartheid, South Africans know the longtime professor as a dogged campaigner against racial discrimination, something he was particularly well-positioned to argue with the apartheid government considering his background in science and genetics.
“You can really only effectively fight racism if you know what race is,” said Tobias, who has since gone on to help draw up United Nations statements against racism. The reality, he said, is that race groups show some genetic differences–but the variation within races and the overlap between them is so great that laws or rules based on race are pointless.
“One cannot deny that people vary,” he said. “There are differences of gender and ethnicity. But so many people fall outside the mean that you can’t make policy based on it.”
Similarly, he says he believes that biblical literalists have lost the point in their rejection of evolution as science. All the world’s great religions have different stories of the world’s origins, he said, and “they can’t all be right.” But the creation stories, he believes, are not the point of sacred writings and beliefs. Instead, he believes, religious stories are designed to impart moral messages in a way people can understand.
“It’s like Aesop’s fables,” he said. “Nobody asks whether the donkey could speak or whether the giraffe’s neck was pulled out by some other mischievous animal. It’s the moral at the end that’s the crucial message.”
As the Vatican agreed in the 1990s, “the church’s concern is the soul and spirit of mankind; what happened to his body and bones in times past is a matter for scientists to reveal,” Tobias said.
No evolutionary pressure
And what lies ahead for mankind? The longtime anatomist doesn’t buy science fiction depictions of big-brained, small-bodied humans any more than the big-brained cartoon cave men of his youth.
Humans, with their air conditioners and cars and other conveniences, are no longer under particular evolutionary pressure to get better at dispersing heat, for instance, or developing longer fingers. Instead, “we wear our culture like an overcoat” that shields us from our environment and from evolutionary change, he said. That makes big changes ahead unlikely.
“We’ve hardly changed in 20,000 years,” he said. He insists that if we walked by a recent human ancestor on the street, we wouldn’t give it a second glance–and the same goes for our distant descendants.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be small changes, perhaps subtle brain reorganization brought on by our dependence on calculators rather than longhand math, he said.
Or he might be wrong. Natural cataclysms, which he now credits for pushing evolutionary change as much as Darwinian pressures, could always intervene. He’s learned never to say never.
“I love paradigm changes,” he said. “It really keeps one young and enthusiastic.”
———-
lgoering@tribune.com
