A snippet so I don't break copyright laws.

Posted on: August 28, 2019 at 13:33:37 CT

On New Year’s Day 1990, I arrived in South Africa with the hope of finding hominin fossils. It was an unlikely place for an American student. The nation was still under the rule of the National Party, the apartheid government. Growing up in Georgia in the 1960s, I knew something about the evils of racial discrimination, and had seen firsthand the changes brought by integration. In South Africa, the winds of change were blowing, too. The government released Nelson Mandela from his long imprisonment in February 1990, and the end of apartheid was on the horizon. I had been accepted as a Ph.D. student at the University of the Wi****ersrand. Known to staff and students as “Wits,” the university is in the heart of downtown Johannesburg. Wits was semi-independent, but the government held the purse strings for the vast majority of research. Human evolution research could not be a priority, because it challenged the premise of apartheid by showing the common origin of all humankind. By the late 1980s, the science was clearly showing that our evolutionary roots began in Africa. The work of many scientists, in South Africa and elsewhere, defied the racial logic of the National Party. Research showed that there was no “natural” separation of the races—but that didn’t mean the apartheid government had to like it. So paleoanthropology in South Africa was struggling. The science of human origins—a strength of the country for 70 years—was in visible decline. Wits was the university where the science of human evolution in Africa had gotten its start, and the home institution of Phillip Tobias—a living link to the field’s early history for me and many other anthropologists of my generation.