Phillip V. Tobias (1925-2012)

In his 1888 Royal Society remembrance, Thomas Huxley noted that Charles Darwin might have become a physician but for his professor whose anatomy lectures were “as dull as he was himself.” Evolutionary biology has much to thank for Darwin's inadequate medical instruction. Thankfully for human evolutionary studies, the opposite happened at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand (“Wits”), where Phillip Tobias was inspired by the anatomist Raymond Dart. In his words, for more than 40 years, Dart was “a kind of father figure and surrogate academic parent to me.” Tobias went on to become legendary for research, scholarship, principles, and educational impacts. Africa has now lost one of her greatest scientists. Tobias (known professionally as PVT) often noted that he was born the year Dart revealed Australopithecus —and the year of Tennessee's Scopes “Monkey Trial.” Born in Durban, South Africa, he moved to Johannesburg in 1942. For the next 70 years, from freshman to emeritus professor, he was associated with Wits. As a student, Tobias grounded himself in a wide range of disciplines, undertaking postdoctoral work in the mid-1950s at Cambridge, Rockefeller, Michigan, and Chicago. He was well prepared to succeed Dart and led the Department of Anatomy at Wits from 1959 to 1990. This long administrative tenure was one of dozens he assumed for his university, country, and world. From the presidency of the South African Speleological Association to the first chairmanship of the South African National Commission for UNESCO, it seemed like Tobias was omnipresent. Dart only indirectly planted PVT's feet in paleoanthropology. Redirecting his career away from studies of living Africans was left to Louis and Mary Leakey, who invited him in 1959 to describe Tanzania's “Zinj” cranium from Olduvai. In short order, Tobias published his magnificently detailed 1967 Cambridge monograph on the new species Au. boisei . He described Homo habilis with Louis Leakey and John Napier in 1964 and monographed the fossils in two 1991 volumes. Tobias was an effective advocate for conservation and outreach. In the 1960s, he began to preserve and manage the Sterkfontein fossil site, undertaking and overseeing paleoanthropology's longest continuously running excavation. His efforts led to UNESCO World Heritage protection in 1999. PVT appreciated the value of human osteological collections and wrote persuasively about their preservation. He generously made himself available to the public, most notably in the 6-week television series for the South African Broadcasting Corporation entitled “Tobias's Bodies.” ![Figure][1] CREDIT: SELWYN TAIT/SYGMA/CORBIS Monuments to his productivity are his many honors and an incredible publication record (more than 1300 titles, ranging from human stature to cytogenetics and from embryology to medical education). Asked in 1988 how he managed, PVT, then 63, replied that “the story that I survive on three hours' sleep a night is not true; it's more like four or five.” He described his life's concerns as “all things human, humane, humanitarian, and humanistic.” In 1999, in the last public act of his presidency, Nelson Mandela presented Tobias with the Order of the Southern Cross of South Africa. Visual remembrances of this gentle giant of paleoanthropology abound, one of the most poignant and current within the “21 Icons” project ([www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU90FGunarA][2]). Since his student days, Tobias had been heavily involved in fighting compulsory racial segregation at South African universities, emphasizing that “race is irrelevant in matters of the mind and spirit.” In 1948, only months after the National Party took power in South Africa, the nonracial National Union of South African Students elected PVT its president. His cause was a 40-year struggle during which “we kept alive the flickering flame of academic freedom, the spirit of resistance and of anti-racism, for all those bitter and painful years.” Throughout, PVT conducted an extensive correspondence with his global extended family (a “Civitas Academica”) as protection from a government whose policies he courageously opposed. By 1996, Tobias was finally able to convey in his seasonal “nuggets of news” letter to colleagues (which annually recounted his tireless global travels and extended acquaintances), “How happy I am to have lived to see the end of statutory racism, discrimination, and segregation and the other evils of the apartheid era.” Generous in his praise and restrained in his advice, Tobias was renowned for his lengthy but engrossing lectures, his command of many languages, his alliance with justice, and his few detractors. He was meticulous with words and fossils, an eternal optimist whose kindness, respect, and generosity were bestowed liberally. He was always first with a word of congratulation for a fossil newly found, a paper well presented, or a custodian in the hallways. Tobias never really retired. In 1998, he and Ron Clarke, his partner in the ongoing work at Sterkfontein (following Alun Hughes), announced the discovery of one of Africa's most important hominid skeletons, “Littlefoot.” Rather than rushing its preparation and analysis, Clarke has followed the careful, meticulous approach of his mentor; any other approach, PVT would have accurately termed malpractice. Huxley wrote about Darwin, “In science no man can safely speculate about the nature and relation of things with which he is unacquainted at first hand.” Phillip Tobias was better acquainted with Homo sapiens than any other scientist. As Francis Thackeray, his Wits successor, eulogized: “We have lost a great and special representative of our species.” [1]: pending:yes [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU90FGunarA