INLSA
Durban-born Professor Phillip Tobias, SAs most honoured and decorated scientist, has died. In this iconic picture, an older Tobias stands in front of a picture of himself while holding a 1.5 million-year-old Tanzanian skull, which belonged to a 15-year-old. PICTURE: JACQUES NAUDE
He was the prof who never forgot a face, the bone man who helped our understanding of our origins and the teacher who inspired a generation of medical students.
Yesterday Professor Phillip Tobias, 87, died after a long illness, ending a career that spanned six decades at Wits University.
He was one of the founding fathers of palaeoanthropology but to many of his colleagues and peers he was far more than that.
There was Tobias the activist, who campaigned against racism and apartheid.
Even in later years he protested against xenophobia, and even the government’s delay in granting the Dalai Lama a visa to enter SA.
His academic interests extended to cultural anthropology and cytogenics, and he turned detective when he offered his theory on who committed the famous Piltdown hoax.
His contributions to humanity and science have been recognised internationally, and he was nominated three times for a Nobel Prize.
But it was in the field of anatomy where Tobias left a lasting impression on perhaps thousands of future doctors.
Medical students remembered the small professor with the beaked nose who had an uncanny ability to remember names.
Later they learnt how he did it. “We had to line up for a group photograph at the beginning of the year, with our name tags. He would look at that picture and memorise our names. Then the first time you met him, he would say: “How nice to meet you, Mr Johnson,” recalled his former student Dr David Johnson.
Years later his students were amazed when he greeted them by name.
“He just had this phenomenal memory,” said colleague Beverley Cramer, professor of anatomy in the School of Anatomical Sciences at Wits.
There was also the quirky Prof Tobias who sometimes fooled around in photographs. And that habit of suddenly stopping at the side of the road during a field trip so he could show his students a pair of circling eagles, or look for Stone Age tools. “He was just a great human and tremendous teacher,” said Johnson.
Another of Tobias’s students, Professor Lee Berger who came from the US to study under him, said: “His influence has been tremendous. He will be associated with Homo habilis, and the work he did at Sterkfontein, with the largest assemblage of hominid fossils in the world.”
Tobias never stumbled across his own species of fossil, but he helped in describing new discoveries and developing an understanding of how these ancestors fitted in in the family tree.
He gave valuable insight into Mrs Ples, Little Foot, the Taung child and Dear Boy, to name a few.
Tobias was born on October 14, 1925, in Durban. “He always like to say he was conceived around the time Raymond Dart was opening up the box that contained the Taung Child,” said Berger.
He enrolled at Wits for a BSc in histology and physiology, and graduated in 1946.
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He will be remembered for his kindness and respect for all, whether addressing presidents, the general public, or scholars,” said Tobias’s colleague and the director of the Institute for Human Evolution, Professor Francis Thackeray.
“We have lost a great and special representative of our species, Homo sapiens.”
Tobias will be buried on Sunda, at the West Park Jewish Cemetery in Joburg.
