by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/26/20
In addition to Asia and the intelligence community, another disturbing connection between these early monster hunts manifested in the way of a possible shared ideology. One other scientist Coon corresponded with over the Yeti was Italian statistician and demographer Corrado Gini (1884-1965). A prominent fascist theorist in the 1920s and 1930s, and close to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Gini shared an interest in anomalous primates with Coon and his cohorts.72 An arch eugenicist Gini believed that nations, like individual people, went through periods of birth, youth, growth, old age then decline, and that strong nations need not apologize for their forceful expansion.73 He also thought, like [Carleton] Coon, that the Snowman might shed light on human evolution and sociological structure. In the late 1930s Gini founded a society that studied genetics and eugenics -- its journal was Genius, where in later years Ivan Sanderson and George Agogino published articles. In 2004 Russian anomalous primate researcher Dmitri Bayonov said that in 1962 Gini founded the Comite International pour l'Etudes Humanoides Velus. [International Committee for Hairy Humanoid Studies] Members of this committee included William Charles Osman-Hill, Bernard Heuvelmans, John Napier, and Phillip V. Tobias as well as John Green and Rene Dahinden.74 While Coon certainly had politically incorrect ideas about race, the others had no overt fascist sympathies. They may simply have welcomed any help from the international community that supported their work -- they embraced scientists from the Soviet bloc as well.
-- Chapter 9: A Yeti-Hunting 007, from "True Stories of Real-Life Monsters" [Excerpt], by Nick Redfern
Pearson also published two popular textbooks in anthropology, but his anthropological views on race have been widely rejected as unsupported by contemporary anthropology. In 1976 he found the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, which has been identified as one of two international journals which regularly publishes articles pertaining to race and intelligence with the goal of supporting the idea that white people are inherently superior (the other such journal being Mankind Quarterly). In 1978 he took over the editorship of Mankind Quarterly founded by Robert Gayre and Henry Garrett, widely considered a scientific racist journal. Most of Pearson's publishing ventures have been managed through the Institute for the Study of Man, and the Pioneer Fund, with which Pearson is closely associated, having received $568,000 in the period from 1981-1991.
-- Roger Pearson (anthropologist), by Wikipedia
Institute for The Study of Man In Africa (ISMA)
Description: The Institute for the Study of Man in Africa (ISMA) was formally established in 1956 by Professor Phillip V. Tobias to perpetuate and foster the pioneering work on Man in Africa initiated by Professor Raymond Dart whose achievements in research on Man in Africa were monumental. From its inception the Institute attracted worldwide interest and academic support. Its appeal arose from its commitment to society in general and the fuller understanding of the conditions of Man in Africa, in health or disease.
Website: Institute for the Study of Man in Africa
Contact details
Physical address: Room 2B17, University of the Witwatersrand Medical School, York Rd., Parktown, Johannesburg, Gauteng
Telephone: (011)6472203
-- Institute for The Study of Man in Africa (ISMA), by Association Finder
Phillip V. Tobias is Professor and Head of the Department of Anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and President of the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa. He has been engaged in researches on the Kalahari Bushmen and other peoples of Subsaharan Africa since 1951, and the study of fossil man has engaged his attention in recent years. He has published many works on the past and present inhabitants of Africa and is the author of Chromosomes, Sex-Cells, and Evolution; Man’s Anatomy (with M. Arnold); and Olduvai Gorge, 1951-1961. He is editing a large work that will be entitled Studies on the Biology of the Bushmen.
-- Bushman Hunter-Gatherers: A Study in Human Ecology, by Phillip V. Tobias, 1964. Reprinted from D.H.S. Davis (Ed.), Ecological Studies in Southern Africa (Mongraphiae Biologicae, Vol. XIV) (The Hauge: W. Junk, 1964).
-- R.A. [Raymond A.] Dart, “Associations With and Impressions of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith,” Mankind 8 (1972), 171-75.
-- The Enigma of Raymond Dart, by Robin Denicourt
Dart, Taung, and the "missing link": An essay on the life and work of Emeritus Professor Raymond Dart, based on a tribute to Professor Dart on His 90th Birthday, Delivered at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on 22 June 1983
Institute for the Study of Man in Africa. Paperback – January 1, 1984
by Phillip V Tobias (Author)
Phillip Vallentine Tobias
Born: 14 October 1925, Durban, Natal, South Africa
Died: 7 June 2012 (aged 86), Johannesburg, South Africa
Nationality: South African
Alma mater: University of Witwatersrand
Known for: Paleoanthropological and evolutionary work
Awards: Fellow of the Royal Society
Scientific career
Fields: Anthropology
Thesis: Chromosomes, Sex Cells, and Evolution in the Gerbil (1953)
Influenced: Patricia Vinnicombe
Phillip Vallentine Tobias FRS (14 October 1925 – 7 June 2012)[1] was a South African palaeoanthropologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He was best known for his work at South Africa's hominid fossil sites.[2] He was also an activist for the eradication of apartheid and gave numerous anti-apartheid speeches at protest rallies and also to academic audiences.[3]
Academic life
Born in Durban, Natal on 14 October 1925, the only son and second child of Joseph Newman Tobias and his wife, Fanny (née Rosendorff), Phillip received his first schooling in Bloemfontein at St Andrew's School and in Durban at the Durban High School. In 1945, he started his career as demonstrator in histology and instructor in physiology at the University of Witwatersrand. He received his Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Histology and Physiology in 1946–1947. In 1948 he was elected the first President of the National Union of South African Students. He graduated in Medicine, Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1950. He was appointed as a lecturer in anatomy in 1951. In 1953, he received his Doctor of Philosophy for a thesis entitled Chromosomes, Sex-Cells, and Evolution in the Gerbil.
In 1955, Tobias started his post-graduate research at the University of Cambridge, England, where he filled the position of Nuffield Dominion Senior Traveling Fellow in physical anthropology. The following year, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Chicago, he was the Rockefeller Traveling Fellow in anthropology, human genetics, and dental anatomy and growth. In 1959, he became Professor and Head of the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology, succeeding his mentor and eminent scholar, Professor Raymond Dart. In 1967, he was awarded a Doctor of Science in palaeoanthropology for his work on hominid evolution. During this period he attended the University of the Witwatersrand. He was Dean of Medicine from 1980 to 1982. He was appointed Honorary Professor of Palaeoanthropology at the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research in 1977 and Honorary Professor in Zoology in 1981.[citation needed] Also in 1981, Tobias became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.[4]
Tobias excavated at the Sterkfontein caves and worked at almost all other major sites in Southern Africa after 1945. He also opened some 25 archaeological sites in Botswana during the French Panhard-Capricorn Expedition while conducting a biological survey of the Tonga People of Zimbabwe. He was one of the anthropologists instrumental in unmasking the Piltdown fraud.[5]
Research
His research has been mainly in the fields of paleoanthropology and the human biology of Africa's various populations. He has studied the Kalahari San, the Tonga people of Zambia and Zimbabwe, and numerous peoples of Southern Africa. Tobias is best known for his research on hominid fossils and human evolution, having studied and described hominid fossils from Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Zambia. His best known work was on the hominids of East Africa, particularly those of the Olduvai Gorge. Collaborating with Louis Leakey, Tobias identified, described and named the new species Homo habilis. Cambridge University Press published two volumes on the fossils of Homo habilis from the Olduvai Gorge. He is closely linked with the archaeological excavation at the Sterkfontein site, a research programme he initiated in 1966. The Sterkfontein caves, which were already well known by his predecessor, Professor Raymond Dart, were used as a vehicle for introducing the second year anatomy students to anthropology and have seen the most sustained excavation of a single site in the world. This site has yielded the largest single sample of Australopithecus africanus as well as the first known example of Homo habilis from Southern Africa. It is now a World Heritage Site.[6]
He published in 1970 an article in which he questioned the link between brain-size, race and intelligence.[7]
Achievements and awards
Bust of Tobias at the Sterkfontein caves
Tobias is one of South Africa's most honoured and decorated scientists, and a world leading expert on human prehistoric ancestors; he has been nominated three times for a Nobel Prize, received a dozen honorary doctorates and been awarded South Africa's Order for Meritorious Service. Tobias published over 600 journal articles and authored or co-authored 33 books and edited or co-edited eight others. He has received honorary degrees from seventeen universities and other academic institutions in South Africa, the United States of America, Canada and Europe. He has been elected as a fellow, associate or honorary member of over 28 learned societies. These include being elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1996).[8]
Among the medals, awards and prizes he has received are the Balzan Prize for Physical Anthropology (1987) and the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (1997). The Royal Society of South Africa is very sparing with its honours, and Tobias is one of only two South African Honorary Fellows of the Society and one of very few recipients of its senior medal, the John Herschel Medal.[9]
He held the positions of Professor Emeritus of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Honorary Professor of Palaeo-anthropology, Honorary Professorial Research Associate and Director of the Sterkfontein Research Unit, and Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York USA. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Cambridge University and other institutions.[10]
Books
• Humanity from Naissance to Coming Millennia – This book covers important recent advances in human biology and human evolutionary studies. The contributions cover a wide range of topics, from Human Biology, Human Evolution (Emerging Homo, Evolving Homo, Early Modern Humans), Dating, Taxonomy and Systematics, to Diet and Brain Evolution.
• Into the Past – In this autobiographical work Tobias recounts the first 40 years of his life through anecdotes, experiences and philosophies.
• Images of Humanity: Selected Writings of Phillip V. Tobias Hardcover – December 31, 1991; ISBN 978-1874800231 - This is a valuable collection of the writings of an acclaimed academic who made important contributions to the sciences and humanities. Always wary of intense specialization, Tobias over the years fostered an interest in the human, social, anthropological and historical sciences. His early studies were in medicine, his PhD was awarded for his thesis.
Notes
1. White, T. D. (2012). "Phillip V. Tobias (1925-2012)". Science. 337 (6093): 423. Bibcode:2012Sci...337..423W. doi:10.1126/science.1225988. PMID 22837516.
2. Wood, Bernard (2012). "Phillip Vallentine Tobias (1925–2012)". Nature. 487 (7405): 571–572. Bibcode:2012Natur.487...40W. doi:10.1038/487040a. PMC 3666235. PMID 23594211.
3. Denise Grady (11 June 2012). "Phillip V. Tobias, Paleoanthropologist Who Analyzed Apelike Fossils, Is Dead at 86". The New York Times.
4. "About Us". World Cultural Council. Retrieved 8 November 2016.
5. Tobias, Phillip V.; Bowler, Peter J.; et al. (1992). "Piltdown: An Appraisal of the Case against Sir Arthur Keith [and Comments and Reply]". Current Anthropology. 33 (3): 243–293. doi:10.1086/204069. ISSN 0011-3204.
6. "Phillip Tobias". Retrieved 9 June 2012.
7. Tobias, P. V. (1970). "Brain-size, grey matter and race —fact or fiction?". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 32 (1): 3–25. doi:10.1002/ajpa.1330320103. PMID 5415587.
8. "DServe Archive Persons Show". royalsociety.org. Retrieved 14 November 2017.
9. Royal Society of South Africa Medal Winners
10. University of Witwatersrand Obituary Archived 25 March 2014 at the Wayback Machine
11. "Scientist Phillip Tobias dies". News24. 7 June 2012. Retrieved 7 June 2012.
12. "Eminent South African anthropologist Tobias dies". Retrieved 8 June 2012.
References
• Tribute to Phillip Valentine Tobias by the Royal Society Of South Africa on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday at the Wayback Machine (archived 2006-09-24)
• Minnesota State University at the Wayback Machine (archived 2007-06-09)
• Goodrum, Matthew R. (2013). "Obituary: Phillip Vallentine Tobias (1925-2012)". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 150 (2): 167–169. doi:10.1002/ajpa.22182. ISSN 0002-9483. PMID 23180609.
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Phillip V. Tobias and the 'Bushman Hunter-Gatherers' (1964)
by Jane Carruthers
Royal Society of South Africa
Accessed: 6/26/20
The first book to be published explicitly entitled Ecological Studies in Southern Africa appeared in 1964, edited by D.H.S. Davis of the Medical Ecology Centre in the Department of Health in Johannesburg. Today, a work called ‘Ecological studies’ would suggest content around ecology, ecological systems, trophic levels, resilience and other principles relating to the natural world. However, an earlier meaning and usage of the word had more to with environmental relationships – the place of animals and plants within particular habitats and their interrelationships, adjustments and accommodation thereto. ‘Ecological studies’ is never defined in Davis’s book, which ranges extremely widely. The work comprises 18 chapters – stretching through the Pleistocene environment and palaeoecology, human origins and fossil studies, vegetation and plant succession, invasive plants, freshwater and estuarine studies, ornithology, genetic studies of flies, gerbil fleas, climatic change, bilharzia, the history of game preservation and veld burning. In all, it is a fascinating miscellany with contributions of uneven focus and quality.
This short article analyses just one of these chapters in order to reflect on the changing discipline of San (Bushman) studies over the past 50 years. It also considers an aspect of the career of Professor Phillip V. Tobias (1925-2012), one of South Africa’s most renowned scientists and a former President of the Royal Society of South Africa.
In 1964, then aged 39, Tobias was already Professor of Anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand. His chapter in Davis was entitled ‘Bushman hunter-gatherers: A study in human ecology’ (Tobias 1964: 67-86). The content was largely based on Tobias’s experiences more than a decade earlier as a member of the 1952 French-sponsored Panhard-Capricorn Expedition led by explorer and geographer Francois Balsan. As Tobias explained in his 2005 memoir, Professor Raymond Dart, then head of the Department of Anatomy at Wits, encouraged Tobias’s participation in what was to be his first long (11 weeks, 6 800 km) expedition. Despite his frequent attacks of asthma, Tobias found the experience of travelling along the Tropic of Capricorn from Namibia to Mozambique through the Kalahari exhilarating, and he credits it with his lasting enchantment of Africa (Tobias 2005: 63-69).
Bushman sucking water through a straw and filling an ostrich egg shell
Tobias’s secondment to Balsan’s expedition was specifically in order to study and measure (anthropometry) the Bushmen (Tobias 1964: 86). San studies today focus largely on their spiritual life, their rock art and belief systems. In this regard, the many publications of Professor David Lewis-Williams FRSSAf , originating in the re-discovery and reinterpretation of the material collected in Cape Town by Wilhelm Bleek and his family in the late 1800s, have deepened our understanding immeasurably. The people that Tobias called ‘Bushmen’ in his chapter in Davis are more frequently today referred to as the ‘San’ so as to avoid the derogatory term that ‘Bushman’ was considered to be, but in fact, ‘San’ may also be pejorative and many San prefer to be called ‘Bushmen’ instead. (In this essay, the terms are used interchangeably.)
In the Davis volume there are two chapters on the San, one is by Tobias and the other by Robert Story, then employed in the Division of Botany in the Department of Agriculture in Pretoria and later at the C.S.I.R.O. in Canberra (Story 1964: 87-99). Story describes the ‘Plant lore of the Bushmen’. Story was extremely knowledgeable about San use of plant material, but not – as Tobias came to be – of their anatomy, their biology and their physical and cultural adaptation to desert life.
Reading ‘Bushmen hunter-gatherers’ today one cannot but be struck by the racial tone of Tobias’s chapter – the indignity of physical anthropology, of measuring people, of considering issues such as morphology, height (dwarfing), the amount of body-fat, genital and infantile features and the like. In his memoir, Tobias acknowledged how his scientific thinking changed over the years and how, at the time of the Balsan expedition (and thus the chapter in Davis), he was ‘under the influence of Raymond Dart’s typological approach to the analysis of the “racial affinities” of African peoples’. While this approach forms the basis of the chapter in Davis, Tobias said that he soon shook off Dart’s influence because ‘it went hand in hand with stereotyping and forms the basis of what the Germans used to call Rassenkunde. Surely such thinking was to be eschewed in an age when we were learning so much more about how the hereditary material worked ….’ (Tobias 2005: 68).
The arrangement of the chapters in the Davis volume is suggestive of the state of scientific thinking at that time and the place of ‘prehistoric people’ in it – as part of the natural rather than the truly human world. The book begins with a chapter on the Pleistocene environment and it is followed by pollen analysis and palaeoecological studies of that era Chapter 3 is concerned with ‘The Pleistocene mammals of southern Africa’. Humanity enters ‘ecological studies’ with Raymond Dart’s exposition on the South African ‘man-apes’ and the chapters by Tobias and Story on the Bushmen follow. There are no other chapters on humans.
Following the theoretical thinking of Marston Bates (1953), Tobias argued that biology and culture were difficult to separate. After describing Bushmen morphology, Tobias pondered the numbers of the surviving San, a task made difficult because of their nomadism and inaccessibility. Definition itself was problematic: What is a Bushman? Are they to be categorised according to their hunting and gathering economy? Their characteristic ‘click languages’? Their physical appearance? Following Schapera, and for the purposes of his discussion, Tobias decided upon language and a mutual recognition of each other. Far from being a ‘vanishing race’ in the region (as many thought), he estimated a population total of 55 531, of whom only 20 lived within the Republic of South Africa. Early European settler massacres of San in South Africa were responsible for their almost complete extermination together with a particularly virulent smallpox epidemic of 1951. By far the majority of San (more than 50 000) were citizens of South West Africa (now Namibia) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana).
The huntsman’s eyes survey a parched horizon. Note how his skin has characteristically lost its elasticity
In accordance with the now abundant confirmation from studies by Lewis-Williams and others, Tobias discussed the earlier widespread distribution of Bushmen in southern Africa, but also included speculation that their being forced into arid environments favoured those with physical attributes and strengths that enabled them to survive under harsh circumstances. Genetic adaptation is a long-term process and thus, according to Tobias, probably did not play a large part in the ability of Bushmen to live in the desert, but their ease of acclimatization did. Better physically able than other communities to withstand extreme heat and cold, Bushmen – as explained by Tobias – were also culturally more flexible. The construction of windbreaks and sleeping quarters partially scooped out as protection from wind, the use of fire, an ethic of sharing, all played their part in survival. Perhaps even more important, however, was the organisation of the community into a variable number, small when food was scarce, large when food was available. Population growth might have been curtailed by infanticide or by abandoning the aged or infirm thus allowing a viable clan or band to persist. The relevance of a gender division and reliance on ‘veldkos’ and water storage were also explained by Tobias as survival techniques. Most significantly, however, he concluded that despite these enduring characteristics of a precolonial lifestyle, the San are modern humans and they are neither static or unchanging – as many apartheid politicians deemed, or wished, them to be. As all humans do, they maximise opportunities that they either make or with which they are presented. Southern African researchers in the 1950s and 1960s were thus, according to Tobias, privileged to be ‘provided with a unique opportunity of studying the dynamics of the transition from the Palaeolithic existence to pastoral life, such as was taking place in the river basins of the eastern Mediterranean thousands of years ago’ (Tobias 1964: 85).
Suggested reading:
Balsan, F. and Marion P., L’Expédition Panhard-Capricorne. Translated by Pamela Search. An account of an expedition across Africa from the Atlantic Coast to the Indian Ocean. (London, 1954).
Hollmann, J.C. ed., Customs and Beliefs of the /Xam Bushmen. (Johannesburg, n.d.)
Lewis-Williams, J.D., The Rock Art of Southern Africa. (Cambridge, 1983).
Deacon, J. and Dowson, T. eds, Voices from the Past: /Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection. (Johannesburg, 1996).
Story, R. ‘Plant lore of the Bushmen’, in Davis, D.H.S., ed., Ecological Studies in Southern Africa (The Hague, 1964), pp. 87-99.
Skotnes, P., ed., Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town, 1996).
Tobias, Phillip, Into the Past: A Memoir. (Johannesburg, 2005).
Tobias, P.V., ‘Bushman hunter-gatherers: A study in human ecology’, in Davis, D.H.S., ed., Ecological Studies in Southern Africa (The Hague, 1964), pp. 67-86.
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Study signals enduring racism in science
by Christa Kuljian
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
14 May 2019
Each university and journal must reflect on its assumptions in biology, medicine, natural sciences, anthropology and the social sciences.
In 1937, the zoology department at Stellenbosch University enlisted 133 men for a study. At the time, the field of physical anthropology was focused on documenting “racial types” and this study helped to scientifically construct and confirm the category “coloured” to distinguish these men from “white Afrikaners”.
Handri Walters wrote her PhD thesis on race, science and politics at Stellenbosch in 2018. She unearthed the data sheets from the 1937 study, which measured skin colour, eye colour, hair texture and more than 80 other measurements of the head and body to determine racial type.
In March 2019, researchers from the department of sports science at Stellenbosch published an article titled Age- and Education-Related Effects on Cognitive Functioning in Coloured South African Women. It concluded: “Coloured women in South Africa have increased risk for low cognitive functioning as they present with low education levels and unhealthy lifestyle behaviours.”
Eighty-two years after the 1937 study, Stellenbosch is still uncritically using the term “coloured” as a frame for research. The use of this colonial and apartheid category in a scientific study resulted in an outcry from academics and social media users alike.
“For scientists and research, it is really difficult,” said Elmarie Terblanche, one of the authors of the Stellenbosch article. Speaking in an interview on Cape Talk radio, Terblanche said: “We have to look at different racial groups, we have to specify. All population groups have different problems and we have to characterise that.”
A statement was put out by the Cape Flats Women’s Movement in response: “We are the demographic of your study. Life on the Cape Flats is brutal and the challenges we face are endless. We don’t think you can even begin to imagine what kind of mental ability this takes. How do you think our children look at us now that a famous university has declared their mothers to be idiots?”
A team of scholars decided to use their voices to speak out against bad science. The team — including Barbara Boswell and Shanel Johannes from the University of Cape Town, Zimitri Erasmus from Wits, Kopano Ratele from Unisa and Shaheed Mahomed of South African History Online — drafted a letter to the editors who published the article.
“We ask that you retract it [the article] because of its racist ideological underpinnings, flawed methodology and its reproduction of harmful stereotypes of ‘Coloured’ women.” The letter became part of a campaign that gained more than 10,000 signatures.
Many South African scholars have documented the history of racism and sexism in science in this country. Saul Dubow in his 1995 book, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, Yvette Abrahams in her articles including The great long national insult (1997), and Ciraj Rassool and Martin Legassick in their book Skeletons in the Cupboard (published in 2000 and updated in 2015) are among the important voices that have contributed to the understanding of this history.
The juxtaposition of the two Stellenbosch studies reminded me of my own shock when I began research for my book Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, published in 2016. Racism and sexism in science have deep roots and go back centuries.
In the mid-1700s, Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, developed the modern system for classifying all living things and published Systema Naturae. He categorised humans as Homo sapiens. Yet, Linnaeus classified the Khoisan and “Hottentot” people of southern Africa in a separate category: Homo monstrosus that included “monstrous or abnormal” people. With this one act of naming and classifying, he sent a dehumanising, painful ripple-effect across the centuries.
Fourthly, the abandonment of the aged and infirm may have some survival value, if a band is on a forced march under conditions of hunger and scarcity. An old person unable to keep pace may be placed in a screen of bushes, provided with firewood and food and water, if available, and deliberately abandoned. If food is found soon, the old one may be rescued; if not, death follows and the hyaenas complete the next phase in the cycle of nature. Such a practice is known, too, among the Hottentots...
At a time of somewhat facile attribution of physical traits to geographical and ecological determinism, it is but a short step from the recognition that the stunted, steatopygous Bushman lives in the desert, to the claim that his peculiarities are the specialized or degenerate products of desert conditions.
The hypothesis that these curious morphological features are desert-determined has bedeviled the literature for decades and largely distracted attention from other aspects of the Bushman's ecology. Thus Hooton suggested that the steatopygia and its accompanying marked lumbar lordosis are an evolved means of overcoming drought. Marett proclaimed the Bushman as "the one form of man specialized for desert conditions" and, among many other reasons, held that steatopygia represented a peculiar capacity to economise water. He also tried to relate the Bushman's small stature to a postulated low activity of the anterior lobe of the pituitary, which, in turn, he related to the need to check diuresis. The yellow skin and epicanthic fold of the Bushman, Marett regarded not as a sign of Mongoloid admixture, but "as a primary character evolved in the desert cradle-land of this race," and the "peppercorn hair" as "an adaptation to withstand heat." Coon cited the Bushman as a human illustration of "Rensch's desert-fat rule," namely that fat in hot desert-dwellers "is deposited in lumps, where it will not interfere with body-heat loss or locomotion." Broom regarded the Bushmen as the degenerate descendants of an earlier prehistoric African race, though he did not directly attribute their degeneration to desert conditions.
-- Bushman Hunter-Gatherers: A Study in Human Ecology, by Phillip V. Tobias
From the eighteenth century onwards, the term hottentot was also a term of abuse without a specific ethnic sense, comparable to barbarian or cannibal. In its ethnic sense, it had developed connotations of savagery and primitivism soon already in the seventeenth century: colonial depictions of the Hottentots (Khoikhoi) in the seventeenth to eighteenth century were characterized by savagery, often suggestive of cannibalism or the consumption of raw flesh, physiological features such as steatopygia and elongated labia perceived as primitive or "simian"; and a perception of the click sounds in the Khoikhoi languages as "bestial". Thus it is possible to speak from the seventeenth century onwards of a European, colonial image of "the Hottentot" which bore little relation to any realities of the Khoisan in Africa, and which fed into the usage of hottentot as a generalised term of abuse. Correspondingly, the word is "sometimes used as ugly slang for a black person".
-- Hottentot (racial term), by Wikipedia
In the early 1900s, it was not unusual for scientists in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States to believe humans could be categorised as distinct racial types and each type could be classified by its physical characteristics. Many scientists embraced the ideas of a racial hierarchy and white supremacy.
Raymond Dart, the head of the department of anatomy at Wits, was inspired by universities in the US and the UK to establish a human skeleton collection in an effort to clarify racial types. Dart also led the first expedition of researchers from Wits to the Kalahari Desert in 1936 because he was interested in the “Bushman anatomy”.
Thanks to a footnote in an important chapter of Deep histories: Gender and Colonialism in South Africa (2000) by Rassool and Patricia Hayes, I learnt of a young woman from the Kalahari named /Keri-/Keri. Dart, according to Rassool and Hayes, took interest in her “in life and death” because he thought she represented a “pure bushman”. So, he took her body measurements and face mask while she was alive, and her body cast and skeleton after she died.
In the same year as the Wits expedition to the Kalahari,/Keri-/Keri was brought by Dart to Johannesburg for further research. She was put on display at the Empire Exhibition celebrating Johannesburg’s 50th anniversary. My research into the Dart archives revealed that a doctor in 1939 alerted Dart that /Keri/Keri had pneumonia and was at Outdshoorn Hospital. Anticipating her death, Dart immediately made arrangements for her body to be transported to Johannesburg.
Several days later, /Keri-/Keri died. In many ways, /Keri-/Keri’s story is reminiscent of Sarah Baartman’s, who had been examined by the French anatomist George Cuvier more than a century earlier. Dart saw /Keri-/Keri’s body and her skeleton as a specimen to be studied. For close to 60 years, her body cast remained on display at Wits and her skeleton remained on a shelf in the Raymond Dart collection of human skeletons.
In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, Unesco drafted a statement on race in 1950, which began: “Scientists have reached general agreement in recognising that mankind is one; that all men belong to the same species Homo sapiens.”
In the same year, the apartheid government implemented the Population Registration Act of 1950, which defined a “coloured person” as someone “who is not a white person or a native”.
Scientists in South Africa continued to work with the concept of “race typology” well into the 1960s. Phillip Tobias, the successor to Dart as head of the department of anatomy at Wits, continued to embrace the existence of racial types, which largely coincided with apartheid’s racial classifications. Tobias built the face mask and skeleton collections at Wits into the 1980s.
Wits University Professor Phillip Tobias measuring an unnamed person during an expedition to the Kalahari in the early 1950s.
In March 2019, just weeks before the Stellenbosch study was published, the American Association of Physical Anthropology put out a new statement on race.
“Racial categories do not provide an accurate picture of human biological variation”, it said, adding “the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination”, and “no group of people is, or ever has been, biologically homogeneous or ‘pure’.”
In the wake of the campaign to retract the journal article, the Psychological Society of South Africa put out an open critique of the study: “The authors have unjustifiably and exploitatively used the apartheid-inspired understanding of race.”
Initially, the university’s deputy vice-chancellor for research, Professor Eugene Cloete, said the findings of the study were those of the authors alone, but in a later statement, he “apologised unconditionally for the pain and anguish which resulted from this article”. The statement made no mention of the faulty scientific assumptions and methodology. Subsequently, the university announced it would conduct a “thorough investigation into all aspects of this study”.
On May 2, the editors and publisher of Ageing, Neuropsychology and Cognition, the UK journal that published the Stellenbosch study, retracted the article, noting: “While this article was peer-reviewed and accepted according to the Journal’s policy, it has subsequently been determined that serious flaws exist in the methodology and reporting of the original study.”
However, the retraction did not critique the framing of the study specifically for its focus on “coloured women,” nor did it acknowledge the perpetuation of racist stereotypes.
The campaign team pointed out this was not only an issue for the four white women researchers. The problem goes much deeper; it is systemic. There is a new generation of academics that did not see the problem.
Everyone who spoke out against the study sounded an important alarm. The lesson is not only for Stellenbosch, but for every academic and research institution in South Africa and around the world to promote sound science.
Each university and journal must reflect on its assumptions in biology, medicine, natural sciences, anthropology and the social sciences. This episode points to the need for greater diversity in these fields, as well as on ethics committees, among peer reviewers and on editorial boards.
Christa Kuljian holds a BA in the history of science from Harvard University. She is the author of Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins (Jacana, 2016), a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and is working on a new book about the history of sexism in science. This article was first published in the Mail&Guardian. Read the original article.