Philip Tobias: 1925-2012

I am late on this story, but Philip Tobias, South African anatomist and paleoanthropologist, a real giant in the field (despite being a very diminutive person in actuality), died last Thursday at the age of 86. The NY Times published his obituary yesterday, and there are scores of obituaries published elsewhere since his passing.

The N.Y. Times obituary, rightfully, places a strong emphasis on the relationship between Tobias and Homo habilis, the species he helped name and conceptualize based on work with fossils from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania in the 1960s. Homo habilis has remained a constant focus of evolutionary argument and debate since its initial classification, with little resolution as to exactly what it represents, what fossils should be included within the categorization, and whether it really does represent a transitional lineage linking Australopithecines and later Homo as Tobias originally believed.

But the most important part of Tobias’ career is almost certainly not his fossil work, but rather his strong stands against apartheid made from within the South African academic system. The Daily Maverick has a longer account on this aspect of Tobias’ career:

At the time, Tobias described how universities like Wits faced the threat of government-enforced segregation. “Immediately, I took action. NUSAS, the National Union of South African Students, which had been non-racial – or ‘multiracial’ as the Americans preferred to call it – elected me president in July 1948, only a few months after the apartheid regime had assumed office.” In 1949, Tobias and his colleagues would launch what he called SA’s first anti-apartheid campaign. “In the beginning, it was a campaign to fight against the threat that apartheid be imposed on the universities. Over the years, it expanded its remit so as to oppose all other moves to impose segregation and grand apartheid on every sector of society.”

Speaking further on race:

Tobias once explained why he raged against Apartheid. “You may perhaps wonder: why should I have all this scientific mumbo-jumbo thrust on to me? It is of nobody’s concern what I believe about the expanding universe or the atomic theory. Why therefore should I concern myself with the scientific theory of race?

“The answer is that these other terms and concepts are emotionally and politically neutral; the term ‘race’, on the other hand, is heavily charged emotionally and politically and full of unsound and even 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. That is why you cannot afford to remain ignorant about ‘race’.

“In a society in which the question of race has come to loom as largely as it does in South Africa, there is, I believe, a positive duty on a scientist who has made a special study of race to make known the facts and the most highly confirmed hypotheses about race, whenever a suitable opportunity presents itself. I should be failing, therefore, in my academic duty, if I were to hold my peace and say nothing about race, simply because the scientific truth about race runs counter to some or all of the assumptions underlying or influencing the race policies of this country. In no field is the need of guidance from qualified scientists more imperative than in this very subject of race,” Tobias said, then in his 70s.

Tobias, by all accounts, was a highly respected anatomist who made important contributions to our understanding of human evolutionary history through his research. But he also offers an example of how, as academics, our research is not the only product we produce, we also provide an example of practice. Tobias put into practice his research by actively recruiting and hiring black South Africans at the Univ. of Witswatersrand at a time when such choices put him in direct conflict with prevailing political and legal doctrine.

About Adam Van Arsdale

I am biological anthropologist with a specialization in paleoanthropology. My research focuses on the pattern of evolutionary change in humans over the past two million years, with an emphasis on the early evolution and dispersal of our genus, Homo. My work spans a number of areas including comparative anatomy, genetics and demography.
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