7

The challenges came in two waves: first, professional pressure arising from an influential paper declaring how we all should be conducting paleoanthropology, and next, because of conflicts from within, among my own colleagues at Wits.

By 2000, Tim White was one of the most respected paleo​anthropo​logists in the world. A wiry young scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, Tim had succeeded beyond all expectation in the shark tank of East African paleoanthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. He first worked with Mary Leakey to describe the fossil remains from Laetoli, Tanzania. Later he helped Don Johanson to define those same fossils together with Don’s new discoveries from Hadar, Ethiopia, as a new species, Australopithecus afarensis. When the Ethiopian government reopened research by foreign scientists in 1989, he returned to make several new discoveries of his own.

As the year 2000 approached, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, one of the premier academic journals in our field, asked prominent scientists to reflect on the discipline at the start of the new millennium. In Tim White’s “view on the science,” he contrasted scientists and “careerists,” suggesting that those who broadcast the excitement of their findings with the general public were somehow less respectable members of the profession, more interested in “paleoanth​ropological media hype.” He invoked a “tragedy of the commons for the profession” in which too many scientists were crowding in to work on too few fossils. Discoveries were on the decline, he predicted: “The best of the African fossil fields have probably already been found and exploited,” he wrote. “By harvesting surface fossils from these sites, we are rapidly exhausting them. Their yields have dropped precipitously.” He painted a pessimistic picture of the future of paleoanthropology for students and young scholars and seemed to propose the old-style members-only approach as the answer to our problems.

His comments countered much of what I was experiencing. When I read these words in 2000, I was still in the midst of the Atlas Project. We had found scores of new potential fossil sites—not expansive sedimentary exposures like those in East Africa, where rains erode fossil bits out of the soft rock, but limestone caves barely visible from the surface, more like time capsules holding fossils within them. White’s commentary hadn’t mentioned South Africa at all, likely because at that time, many of the world’s leading paleo​anthropo​logists didn’t consider South Africa worth mentioning. I felt optimistic: Given what we had already found, I was pretty confident that one of the sites might lead to a significant discovery. Still, even I had to admit that our exploration results had so far been pretty disappointing. In a decade of looking, I had found only a handful of hominin teeth. Seeing these slim results, at the same time such a prominent scientist was going on record that the age of African fossil discovery was ending, I could tell that funding for new exploration in Africa was going to become harder and harder to find.

AT WITS, THESE YEARS represented a slow and often difficult transformation. By 1998 I had settled into my role as director of paleoanthropology, making difficult decisions about the future of the unit. Money remained tight, and it was my job to balance the outflow of money against research results. One of the biggest expenses was the Sterkfontein excavation. Although it had been the most productive site in South Africa, hundreds of fossils sat in the vault, still undescribed. The primary investigator at Sterkfontein was Ron Clarke, and although I respected his work—we had even published a paper together—it looked to me as if research coming out of the cave had dwindled. The huge expense of running the site could not be sustained without productivity, and so I made the decision to scale back at Sterkfontein and let Ron Clarke go.

When Clarke had taken over excavation at the site in 1991, he had inherited many fossils that remained to be properly sorted and identified. In these remains were fossils from an underground chamber, the Silberberg Grotto, which contained some of the oldest fossils from the cave. Among them, Clarke recognized six hominin foot bones, and five of them belonged to a single foot. This exceptional fossil find quickly became known as “Little Foot.” Ron Clarke and Phillip Tobias published a paper describing these foot fossils in 1995, arguing that the foot’s big toe stuck out quite a bit from the other toes, a shape that might reflect a greater ability to climb than found in living humans.

After that, Clarke continued to investigate the source of that foot. The fossils included a broken-off tibia, or shinbone. He and his field assistants, Stephen Motsumi and Nkwane Molefe, pored over the breccia in the Silberberg Grotto to see if they could find a bone that matched up. Finally they found a fragment stuck in the rock of the grotto with a cross section that matched the tibia. Clarke, Motsumi, and Molefe had been working for months, carefully chiseling away the breccia to expose more of the tibia and ultimately revealing more and more of the skeleton of Little Foot. They uncovered parts of both legs, an arm, and the skull. And there was even more within the rock.

Trouble was, I didn’t know about these discoveries when I made the decision to shut down Sterkfontein. For more than a year, Clarke had been working on the most spectacular discovery ever made at the site—a hominin skeleton—and he had been working on it secretly. I saw this skeleton, for the first and last time, in late September 1998. He arranged for me to meet him at the cave, telling me he had something to show me. Phillip and I met him there with the head of the Wits anatomy department, Beverley Kramer. As we entered the small chamber, I was surprised to find a documentary filmmaker there, with a cameraman and sound recorder. Ron had decided to make his discovery public. And there was a skeleton, partially emerging from the rock, an extraordinary discovery by any measure. I was shocked. Why had Ron kept this a secret?

From that moment, things went downhill for me.

A rift had been brewing between Ron and me ever since I had become director back in 1996. Phillip Tobias and I had our own growing differences of opinion as well. I wanted to increase the access we gave to visiting scientists who wanted to come work with our fossil collections. I saw it as a way to maximize the scientific value of the collection and the productivity of the entire unit, but Phillip was growing more and more uncomfortable with that approach. Ron may have been afraid that I would insist on extending access to Little Foot to other researchers, denying him the exclusive credit for his discovery. The tensions between Ron, Phillip, and me would probably have amounted to little, if not for Little Foot. That skeleton became the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Little Foot was a discovery of historic proportions, but the situation devastated me. I had been making administrative decisions without the full knowledge of a major discovery right under my nose. Revealed to the public, Little Foot became a press sensation. Repercussions from the conflict rippled through the field. Senior scientists at other institutions weighed in, many of them already irritated by my attempts to open greater access to the Wits hominin fossil collections. Public opinion saw me as a clueless administrator who had wronged the discoverer of the most important fossil find in South African history. After six months of quite vicious exchanges, with no real solution in sight, the university administration decided to divide paleoanthropology into two entities: my own exploration research group and the Sterkfontein research group, led by Ron Clarke and Phillip Tobias. I would have to rebuild my entire program of work, not to mention my reputation within the discipline.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this major shake-up had unforeseen benefits, for it forced me to break from the past. The legacy of Dart and Tobias was a vault full of fossils that someone else had discovered. In the long run, my newfound independence from this legacy was liberating. It instilled in me a strong drive to go out and make discoveries of my own. I had the Atlas Project under way, and I could focus my attention on finding something new, not working on old sites and already discovered fossils.

Still, it would take more than eight years under the most trying of circumstances before my independence and persistence paid off.