Phillip Vallentine Tobias: October 14, 1925–June 7, 2012

“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of giants.” This phrase, immortalized by Sir Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke dated February 5, 1675, takes on a special and bitterly poignant meaning in the context of the passing of Phillip V. Tobias. Newton was, of course, paraphrasing, with considerable abbreviation, the translation of the statement by John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres, who wrote in his Metalogicon, or Defense of the Trivium (1159): “Nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvenimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea.” [Translation: “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.”] We imagine that Phillip would probably have appreciated not only the fullness of John's prose, but also its melodiousness in the original Latin. And, though Phillip was of rather economic stature, this belied his intellectual enormity and the magnitude of his impact on the field of paleoanthropology, his colleagues, and especially his students. June 7, 2012, witnessed his passing. Phillip V. Tobias was an internationally renowned scholar, educator, and activist. His name will be forever synonymous with the most famous of the hominin fossils discovered by Louis and Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and with the excavations that have been conducted continuously since 1966 at the fossil site of Sterkfontein, South Africa. He was, in addition to and perhaps above all else, a preeminent authority in paleoanthropology. As an academic, he was dedicated, perseverant and caring, having served the University of the Witwatersrand in his native South Africa for close to seven decades. It is difficult to imagine that many others can lay claim to such loyalty. 1 Phillip Tobias standing in the Sterkfontein Type Site excavation in South Africa. Adorned in one of his favorite Dashiki shirts, he holds in his left hand a cast of the iconic “Mrs. Ples,” which was discovered by Robert Broom at the spot designated by the plaque on the wall of the excavation. In his right hand, Phillip holds a cast of the Stw 53 Homo cranium discovered in 1976 by Alun Hughes, the leader of the excavation team under Phillip's direction. Photograph by F. E. Grine. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.] The year 1925 was doubly auspicious, not only for South Africa, but also for global science. On February 7th of that year, Raymond A. Dart announced in the pages of Nature the new fossil “man-ape” from South Africa, Australopithecus africanus. Later that year, on October 14th, Phillip was born; he was known on occasion to speculate that he had been conceived the day that Dart's fossil was discovered. Whether or not this is accurate, Tobias would come to enjoy an ongoing relationship with Dart, the Taung skull, and Australopithecus. Phillip was born in Durban to Joseph Newman Tobias, the owner of a toy shop, and Fanny (née) Rosendorff, a piano teacher. Phillip, who had learned to read by the age of three, was fascinated by natural history from a young age. His wolf-cub scout leader introduced him to osteology and anatomy, and his interests in zoology and archeology grew from frequent visits to the Durban Natural History Museum during his teenage years. Phillip's sojourn into science, however, was catalyzed by the premature death from diabetes of his older sister and only sibling, Valerie. Phillip was 15 years old at the time, and neither his family doctor nor anyone else in South Africa seemed suitably knowledgeable about genetics to be able to explain to him why his maternal grandmother had also died of the disease, while his mother and he were both free from of it. Tobias resolved to become the first South African to be able to explain this. In 1944, following his schooling in Durban and Bloemfontein, Phillip enrolled in the Medical School of the University of the Witwatersrand (known to all as Wits) in Johannesburg. Two years later he obtained a BSc with dual majors in histology and physiology, and the following year a BSc Honours in histology. In 1950 he was awarded the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB BCh) degree (equivalent to the M.D. degree in the United States). It was as an undergraduate student at Wits that Phillip first encountered his future mentor, Raymond Dart. At that time, Dart was the Head of the Department of Anatomy in the Medical School. In 1948, the year that the National Party came to power in South Africa, Phillip was elected President of the National Union of South African Students. The first of the Apartheid Laws (the “Prohibition of Mixed Marriages” Act of 1949) followed soon thereafter, with the cornerstone “Population Registration” and “Group Areas” Acts being signed into law in 1950. By 1953, the National Government had enacted the “Bantu Education” Act, which legally brought Apartheid into the schools and universities. Phillip launched a campaign in opposition to enforced segregation and the restriction of academic freedom at universities; the protest he helped organize at Wits in 1957 was one of the earliest official protests against the Apartheid policies of the government. His activism also pursued the scientific vein, with the publication in 1953 of an article in the Journal of Forensic Medicine (volume 1, issue 2, pp. 113–123) entitled “The problem of race determination.” This manuscript decrying the basis of racial classification was the first of many such penned by him. Although Phillip detested its Apartheid laws, he loved South Africa. He was afforded ample opportunity throughout his career to take academic positions abroad, but he remained at Wits. Indeed, he was a strong vocal opponent of moves to academically isolate South Africa, for this would have weakened its universities, and he balked at the idea of bequeathing second-rate centers of higher education to its post-Apartheid citizenry. Phillip also co-authored a formal complaint to the South African Medical Council regarding the mishandling of the case of Steven Biko (the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, who had died as a result of abuse during police interrogation), and he was instrumental in gaining the return to South Africa of the remains of Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman. Sarah, a Khoikhoi woman from the Eastern Cape Province, had been taken as a slave to Europe in 1810 to be exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus.” After her death in 1815, her skeleton and body parts were displayed in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris. Although the museum removed the display in the mid-1970s, her remains were repatriated only in April, 2002. It was a case that, for indigenous South Africans, became an important symbol of their freedom from colonialism. In recent years, Phillip was also involved in public protests against the initial HIV/AIDS policies of the South African government, and as recently as 2011, he actively protested the South African government's refusal to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama. In 1999, President Nelson Mandela awarded Phillip Tobias the Order of the Southern Cross, as much for his acts of defiance and courageous moral indignation as for his lifelong achievements in science. Although Phillip obtained the MB BCh, he never practiced medicine. Rather, he moved directly into research, completing a Ph.D. in 1953 under Joseph Gillman on “Chromosomes, Sex-Cells and Evolution of the Gerbil.” Whilst working on his thesis, Philip participated in the French Panhard-Capricorn Expedition to Botswana, where he collected data on the biological anthropology of the Kalahari San. Two years later, Phillip was at Cambridge University as a Nuffield Dominions Senior Travelling Fellow, undertaking postdoctoral work in physical anthropology. Tobias returned to Wits and, in 1959, upon Dart's retirement, assumed the mantle of Head of the Department of Anatomy, a position he held until 1990. Upon his assumption of the department's stewardship, Phillip recognized the need for a manual on cadaveric dissection that would incorporate developmental anatomy and, in 1963, published, with M. Arnold, the three-volume Man's Anatomy. The year 1959 also witnessed his entry into hominin paleontology at the most prestigious level imaginable to any 34-year-old. That was the year that Louis and Mary Leakey discovered, in Bed I of Olduvai Gorge, the truly spectacular cranium they dubbed Zinjanthropus boisei. They were quick to recognize Philip as the young anatomist to whom they wanted to entrust the description and analysis of their fossil. The invitation took place on the banks of the Congo River. Recounting the story in a public lecture in 2006 at Stony Brook University, Phillip related that he “nearly subsided into the mud with astonishment at their generous offer.” It was a career-changing invitation, for until then he had been working mainly on the biological anthropology of the San and Tonga peoples of Botswana and Zambia. It was an invitation that set his feet into the mud and firmly into the world of fossils. Thus began a lengthy collaboration with the Leakeys, which saw Phillip being given for study nearly every hominin fossil they uncovered in Tanzania, principally at Olduvai Gorge, and Kenya. Phillip's meticulous description and analysis of their 1959 discovery resulted in the publication in 1967 of a 264-page monograph entitled The Cranium and Maxillary Dentition of Australopithecus (Zinjanthropus) boisei. It was largely, but not solely, on the basis of this work that Phillip was awarded the D.Sc. degree by Wits University that same year. Other fossils from Olduvai Gorge differed dramatically from the large-toothed Zinjanthropus cranium, and these formed the basis for another new species. This one, being much more closely related to humans, was dubbed Homo habilis by Louis Leakey, Phillip Tobias, and John Napier in 1964. These fossils were treated to a similarly exhaustive two-volume monograph, The Skulls, Endocasts, and Teeth of Homo habilis, published in 1991. It is for his work on early hominin evolution that Tobias is best known. For much of his career, he directed excavations at the site of Sterkfontein. Between 1966 and 1993, Tobias' team recovered over 500 hominin fossils from this ancient repository. Most have been attributed to Dart's species Australopithecus africanus, but Philip's efforts were doubly rewarded in 1976 with the discovery of a partial cranium that he and Alun Hughes recognized as belonging to our own genus. The fossil came from deposits of a slightly younger age than those that had yielded the famous skull of “Mrs. Ples” to Robert Broom, and Phillip was inclined to include it in Homo habilis. The Australopithecus fossils recovered from Sterkfontein under Phillip's stewardship included many crania and dentitions upon whose descriptions he eagerly collaborated, adding even further to an astonishing record of publications relating to human evolution. In addition to the monographs on the fossils from Olduvai Gorge, Phillip authored or co-authored something on the order of 400 peer-reviewed journal articles in the field. Among the many accolades bestowed upon Phillip throughout a long and distinguished career, he was recipient in 1992 of the Order of Meritorious Service of South Africa, and in 2010, of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. In addition, numerous honorary degrees from universities in South Africa, Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada were conferred on Phillip. The last, bestowed by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, was conferred in absentia on April 18, 2012. Although Phillip had no immediate progeny, he maintained that “I have taught over 10,000 students, and all of those are, in some small way, like my children. So it is not a genetic legacy that I leave, but rather a cultural one, orally transmitted through education, the value of which cannot be overemphasized. I like to believe that I have given something valuable to every one of them, and I can tell you quite honestly that almost every one of them has given something very valuable to me, and I remember them as my own family.” Certainly those of us fortunate to be counted among his family will bear testament to having received something of considerable value from him. On Phillip's passing, the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, released a statement of condolences in which he wrote, “We have lost a renowned scientist, a scholar and a unique human being. Our country remains eternally proud of his work.” Phillip will be sorely missed by his students, the paleoanthropological community, and especially by South Africa. As a final salute, it is perhaps fitting to employ isiZulu, the most widely spoken home language in his native South Africa and his birthplace of KwaZulu-Natal: “Hamba kahle Phillip.”

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