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South Africa's fabulous fossils
Very few people outside that scientific community know that the natural rock and fossil resources of South Africa stand alone on a global basis as representing more of the history of our planet than can be found in any other single country in the world. The rocks of South Africa tell more than two-thirds of the story of our Earth, through the fossils they contain and the unequalled geological features they constitute. South African fossils range from 3 800 million years ago (the second oldest fossils in the world) to the last million years. They record the earliest of life forms - microscopic single cells that pulsed in the primeval global ocean. They register the arrival of shelled and then skeletoned creatures in the prehistoric seas. They reveal the first plants that ever colonised the land, outside the warm womb of the water. They are the oldest fossils of that early life; the oldest fossils of backboned fish; the oldest fossils of the first land plants. South Africa is the only country in the world that can not only trace the story of creatures but can actually track the development of features, because its fossil record is unbroken for a stretch of more than 100 million years. This is unheard of anywhere else. The stones of South Africa tell the whole story - from the very beginning - of both dinosaurs and mammals. They have the world's greatest record of the animals that dominated land before the dinosaurs: strange creatures called mammal-like reptiles (or therapsids), that were remarkable combinations of mammal and reptile at the same time. A branch off the reptile line, they developed over millions of years to produce the first true mammals. South African fossils show the first ever mammals. And the first dinosaurs. And the first crocodiles. And the first turtles. And the first tortoises. And, moving ever closer and closer to ourselves, the first people. THE DEAFENING SILENCE How can all this be true, and yet unknown to the wider public? It is a tragic fact that ordinary people everywhere - in South Africa, in Africa as a whole and internationally - have never been exposed to the story revealed by the fossil treasures of South Africa, or know the extent of the fossil treasurehouse in this remarkable country. Why? Because the recent past conspired to keep the far distant past unknown. The apartheid government, in league with the Dutch Reformed Church, prohibited the teaching in schools of any science related to evolution. It was anti-God, they said. It was anti-Bible. This manifest nonsense - science has never offered itself as the alternative to the Christian God or any other faith - deprived generations of South Africans of all races, creeds and educational experience of any knowledge of their country's contribution to the story of life on Earth. It deprived people around the world of that knowledge, too. That policy - that wilfully anti-knowledge national policy current for more than four decades - deprived all the peoples of our country of much more than an understanding of their national natural heritage. It left them without any solid foundation to the teaching that was permitted - of biology and geography, of environmentalism and ecology. Without a firm base in the Earth Sciences, particularly palaeontology and geology, all these other disciplines are missing a key link. It is like studying physics without any mathematics, or English without any vocabulary. There was another insidious and invidious result of that censorial approach to education: a lack of South African scientists in those very fields in which South Africa was richest. How can you grow palaeontologists if nobody has ever heard of palaeontology? Funding for the 'forbidden' sciences was also severely limited, although geology fared better than palaeontology because the mining industry needed its research. That did not prevent a shortage of local geologists, though. The very industry that is based in the local science was - and still is - top heavy with imported scientists. And there was yet more fallout from that criminal censorship of science - fallout that, like a nuclear winter, still freezes vast areas of South Africa's educational system. No books were written to take palaeontology to the people. No textbooks were produced. No informational material at all was made available to the teachers or the pupils or anyone outside the rarified atmosphere of tertiary research. Still today, when the country's post-1994 educational system has been opened to provide entry to the totality of the Earth Sciences, its teaching is impossible in the overwhelming majority of South African schools. How can teachers teach a subject about which they know absolutely nothing, to which they have never in their lives been exposed? How can teachers teach a subject without books or resource materials? Palaeontology might be an industry in its own right in the West and in the East - a multibillion dollar industry that has developed and grown over more than five decades. But the products of that industry were kept away from the people of South Africa. They have never had the opportunity to read the mass-market books, buy the beautifully printed posters, give their children the toys and models and tee-shirts and all the other paraphernalia so familiar in North America and Europe and the Far East. The first exposure South Africans ever had to this economic sector was the arrival in the country of the movie Jurassic Park. It, and its sequel, played to packed houses all over the country: dino-fever was a national symptom. Since then, the progressive blossoming of the country has introduced more of this industry in the form of television and cinema. There has been Land Before Time, and Walking with Dinosaurs, and - more recently, Disney's Dinosaur. All sellout successes. There remains, however, a desperate need for mass-market information in South Africa, from the educational to the entertaining. RIGHTING THE HISTORIC WRONGS Time World wants to help right the terrible wrongs done to South African science, to South African schools, to South Africans, and to everyone else everywhere else who has been denied the knowledge won from the rocks and fossils of South Africa. That is what this website is all about. It is part of Time World's quest to tell a story no-one has told before, with characters never seen before, in a way that nobody has done before. WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THIS WEBSITE? Everything that this website contains has been checked and is endorsed by the BPI at Wits. You are guaranteed that the information it provides is correct, accurate and up-to-the-minute.
THE SITE ALSO PROVIDES YOU WITH THE OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS PALAEONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTES IN THE WORLD. YOU CAN SEND US YOUR QUESTIONS - ANYTHING AT ALL YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT PREHISTORY - AND WE WILL GET THE ANSWERS FROM THE SCIENTISTS AND PUT THEM ON THE WEBSITE. YOU ARE ALSO WELCOME TO SEND US SUGGESTIONS ABOUT WHAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE ON THE SITE, AND JUST GENERALLY STAY IN TOUCH WITH US.
THE STORY OF THE BERNARD PRICE INSTITUTE AT WITS The Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research (BPI) was named for a man who was neither a scientist nor an academic, although he was widely read and deeply interested in things prehistoric. Bernard Price was a Scot, an electrical engineer who made a private fortune and became Managing Director of the Victoria Falls Power Company in Southern Africa in the early 1940's. He was also deeply committed to science, and poured thousands of pounds of his own money into research work at the fledgeling University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It was in 1945 that he encountered a fellow Scot who was destined to make an enormous impression on him: the eccentric but brilliant physician-turned-palaeontologist Dr Robert Broom, who made palaeontological history when he discovered the early hominid nicknamed 'Mrs Ples' in 1947. During a Wits university lecture attended by Price, Dr Broom spoke eloquently about the thousands of South African fossils being destroyed annually by weathering and neglect, and stressed the need to preserve these national treasures.
Price was moved to
respond, and donated He asked Dr Broom who should be employed to find fossils for the new institute, and the immediate response was the name James Kitching. This was hardly surprising. Kitching came from a tiny, picturesque town in the fossil-rich Karoo region of South Africa, where Dr Broom had been a regular visitor over the years. He had actually inspired the entire Kitching family to become dedicated fossil collectors - so dedicated, in fact, that he had dubbed James's father “the greatest fossil-hunter in the world”. The young James he had called “the greatest fossil-finder” because of his uncanny knack of seemingly 'seeing' fossils inside rock. So it was only natural that the Kitching name should be the answer to Bernard Price's question. Immediately after demobilisation at the end of World War II, therefore, the 23-year-old James Kitching was appointed field collector of the Bernard Price Institute - its first and only employee. Five days later he set off by train to his beloved Karoo. Using his mother's car and his own ration of eight gallons (45 litres) of petrol a month, he collected more than 200 beautifully-preserved fossil skulls in five months. Even before all this, the University played a central role in events that would reshape scientific history - and redesign palaeontological science in the future. It was 1922, and a new academic acquisition had arrived in Johannesburg to set up a Department of Anatomy at the budding University of the Witwatersrand Medical School. It was one Dr Raymond Dart, who had been studying the evolution of the brain and nervous system in London since 1918. He believed it imperative for the new Department to build up an anatomy museum, and offered £5 to any student collecting “the most interesting finds on the veld during the holidays” (in his own words). In 1924 one of his students, Josephine Salmons - the only woman science student at the time - found what she thought was a baboon fossil from a limestone mine at Taungs, situated in the then Bechuanaland Protectorate. Dart was astonished at the find, since to his knowledge at that time not a single fossil of any of the primates (the order to which man and all apes, monkeys and baboons belong) had been formally reported south of Egypt. He visited the mine and persuaded the manager to send him two boxloads of blocks containing bone fragments, which arrived at his home some days later when Dart was dressing for a wedding where he was due to be Best Man. Unable to resist the lure of the boxes despite the time constraint, he wrenched off the lid of the first one only to find traces of fossilised eggshells and turtle shells and some fragments of bone. Disappointed, he tackled the second box. What follows is in Dart's own words from his book Adventures with the Missing Link (Hamish Hamilton Ltd, London, 1959): “Impatiently I wrestled with the lid of the second box, still hopeful but half expecting it to be a replica of its mate. At most I anticipated baboon skulls, little guessing that from this crate was to emerge a face which would look out on the world after an age-long sleep of nearly a million years. As soon as I had removed the lid, a thrill of excitement shot through me. On the very top of the rock heap was what was undoubtedly an endocranial cast or mould of the interior of the skull. Had it been only the fossilised brain cast of any species of ape it would have ranked as a great discovery, for such a thing had never before been reported. But I knew at a glance that what lay in my hands was no ordinary anthropoidal brain. Here in lime-consolidated sand was the replica of a brain three times as large as that of a baboon and considerably larger than that of any adult chimpanzee. The startling image of the convolutions and furrows of the brain and the blood vessels of the skull was plainly visible.” It was part of what is known today around the world as the Taung Child, a three-piece fossil that includes the front of the face of the skull and most of the lower jaw (the two pieces Dart found in the box during the following days) as well as the brain cast. He excavated the fossil with a variety of tools - including a sharpened knitting needle purloined from his wife - and then embarked on a more than 20-year battle with the international scientific community who rejected outright his identification of the fossil as an intermediary stage between man and ape - a “Missing Link”. Dart never faltered in his lonely war against the conventional wisdom of the time, although it took its toll on him; he suffered a mental breakdown. His one supporter was Dr Robert Broom - that same eccentric physician who had come to South Africa to unearth the origin of mammals and of man, and who had so inspired Bernard Price. Broom promised Dart that he would find the adult of the child, and together they would prove the world wrong. In 1945, he did just that. He discovered in another limestone mine an adult skull which is today acknowledged as belonging to Australopithecus africanus (“Southern Ape of Africa”), the lilting name created by Dart for the lonely little Taung baby. (It is pronounced 'Aw-stral-o-pith-ek-uss aff-rik-ah-nuss'). It was in the same year of 1945 that Bernard Price endowed his Institute at Wits, making it a year that should stand out in the history of science as pivotal to palaeontology. Bernard Price himself was captivated by the story of human origins told by Broom and Dart, and donated a further £1 000.00 a year to Wits towards the search for man's ancestors. James Kitching was approached - again - to help. Dart and Kitching worked at a site outside the town of Potgietersrus called Makapansgat (pronounced 'Muk-uh-puns-gut' with a gutteral 'g' like the “ch” in the Scottish word “loch”). They were looking for what Dart called “man-apes”, and they found them - a massive collection not only of australopithecines (aw-stral-o-pith-ess-eens) up to three-and-a-half million years old but also a wondrous number of creatures that lived at the same time: baboons and wildebeest; giant antelope and slight gazelle; hyaenas and elephant; wild pigs and porcupines; buffalo that looked more like the water-buffalo from the Far East than the modern African version. And more. Always more. Dart amassed a formidable collection of fossils, and his work pioneered the science known today as taphonomy (ta-fon-om-ee) - the study of methods of fossilisation, and of what happens to bones after animals die. He also used the fossils as the basis of a famous and still-controversial theory about the behaviour of australopithecines, known as the Osteodontokeratic Culture (oss-tee-o-don-toe-kerr-at-ick) - named from the Greek for 'bone, tooth, horn'. Dart believed the ape-men used these 'natural tools' to kill not only creatures, but also one another. And through all this, digging beside Dart, was Kitching - the man synonymous for more than half a century with the Bernard Price Institute. Kitching's almost unearthly ability to unearth fossils became legend. He was the first man ever to find fossils in the Antarctic, where he is commemorated by a geographic feature known as Kitching Ridge. He was taken to the United States of America where he discovered some of the most scientifically important fossils ever to come out of that country. His work in South Africa has led to a collection that is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the most important in the world. The Bernard Price Institute has grown from a one-man show whose only premises were a disused army hut, to an internationally renowned and respected institute. From its earliest days to the time its scientists provided the first ever internationally accepted scientific proof for the theory of continental drift, from the time it backed Dart in his controversial hominid research, the BPI has consistently produced pioneering work. And in 1999, it finally and fittingly reunited the disciplines of palaeontology at Wits - long split into plant and animal study at the Institute and the study of human origins at the Medical School. The Palaeoanthropological Unit for Research and Exploration (PURE) is now part of the Bernard Price Institute, creating a research body that is arguably the most powerful such scientific organisation in the world. Its expert palaeontologists are active not only in research, but also in the education and training of postgraduate students, providing South Africa with the palaeoscientists of the future. The Institute is still the only Department of Palaeontology not only at a South African university but also on the African continent, yet it continues its commitment to dynamic fieldwork, discovering new and ever more unique animals and plants. And James Kitching, 78 years old, long retired but still an Honorary Research Professorial Fellow, continues - despite his age and failing health - to remain connected with his beloved BPI. In a legendary career, he has spent a total of more than 18 years in the field and walked the equivalent of 11 times around the world in his search for fossils. The results lie in the storerooms and laboratories of the Bernard Price Institute: priceless pieces of the history of the Earth, tantalising clues to the world that was.
The Institute has spent more than half a century gathering and unravelling those stony clues to the past, and has moved into its second half-century intent on providing ever more answers to the great questions of our long-gone yesterdays.
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