Obituary: Phillip Vallentine Tobias (1925-2012).

Phillip V. Tobias died on June 7, 2012 in Johannesburg at Wits University Donald Gordon Medical Centre, at the age of 86. Phillip Tobias was born in Durban, Natal, Republic of South Africa, on October 14, 1925, the only son and second child of Joseph Newman Tobias (who was born in Portsmouth, England) and Fanny Rosendorff (who was born in Edenburg, Orange Free State). He learned to read by the age of 3, but his childhood was disrupted by his parents’ divorce as well as his father’s bankruptcy. When Tobias was 15 years old, his sister Valerie, then only 21 years old, died of diabetes and this was a major factor that contributed to his intention to study medicine. Tobias attended Durban Preparatory High School from 1933 to 1935 but spent the following year at President Brand School, in Bloemfontein, and the next 2 years at St Andrews School in Bloemfontein. He entered Durban High School in 1939 and graduated in 1942. In 1944, he enrolled at the medical school of the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was appointed as Demonstrator in Histology and Instructor in Physiology in 1945. Tobias had the good fortune to study genetics with Raymond Dart and paleontology with Joe Gillman during his time as a student and under their influence he was exposed to paleoanthropology. Dart was already well-known for his studies of a new type of hominid he named Australopithecus africanus, based on a partial skull and endocast discovered in Taung in 1924, and he was just entering a new phase of research on the australopithecines when Tobias was taking classes. As a student, Tobias also became involved in student politics. He was elected as President of the National Union of South African Students three times (1948–1950) and in this role he led some of the earliest campaigns against the apartheid government. In 1948, the National Party came to power in South Africa and one consequence of its apartheid policies was that the student union, which had previously been nonracial, is now racially segregated. Tobias’ opposition to this marks the beginning of a life-long effort to combat apartheid. As a student, Tobias had some of his first experiences with archaeology and paleontology. While traveling with a botanist friend in the Transvaal in 1945, he stopped to take a closer look at a yellowwood tree located in a cave, which he later named Mwulu’s Cave, when he felt a hard object buried in the sand. When he dug the object out, it proved to be a prehistoric stone tool dating from the Southern African Middle Stone Age (50,000–100,000 years old). That same year, he led a group of fellow students to explore the Makapansgat Valley where he found fossil baboon skulls among the breccia from Limeworks Cave, which indicated that its deposits were contemporaneous with other australopithecine deposits. Tobias received a B.Sc. degree in Histology and Physiology in 1946 and a B.Sc. Honors (1st Class) in Histology in 1947, and he completed his medical degree (M.B., B.Ch.) in 1950. He was appointed as lecturer in anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1951 and in 1953 and he received his Ph.D. for a thesis titled Chromosomes, Sex-Cells, and Evolution in the Gerbil. Tobias undertook postgraduate research in 1955 at Cambridge University, in England, where he was a Nuffield Dominion Senior Traveling Fellow in physical anthropology. The following year he traveled to the United States to continue his postgraduate studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (where he worked in anatomy with Bradley Patten, human genetics with James V. Neel and anthropology with Fred Thieme and James Spuhler) and at the University of Chicago (where he worked with Sherwood Washburn) as a Rockefeller Traveling Fellow in anthropology, human genetics, and dental anatomy and growth. After returning to South Africa, Tobias was instrumental in establishing, in 1956, the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa. The Institute, housed at the University of the Witwatersrand and meant as a living memorial to Raymond Dart, was created to advance the study of human ancestry and evolution. Then in 1959, Tobias succeeded his mentor Raymond Dart as Professor and Head of the Department