A new book lifts the lid on a slug-fest involving some of the country’s most distinguished scientists
Ellen Bartlett
Palaeoanthropology researchers at Wits University – renowned the world over for their scientific work – have become such a fractious bunch internally that the university’s management has had to separate the opposing factions, placing them at opposite ends of the campus.
Whatever hopes Wits referees might have had of breaking up the fight quietly, however, have been dashed by the publication this month of a book by one of the combatants, the charismatic young American palaeoanthropologist, Lee Berger.
In In the Footsteps of Eve the 34-year- old Berger tells his side of the story of what led to the split in palaeoanthropology, and his departure earlier this year from the department of anatomy and human biology. He levels numerous accusations against former colleagues, notably his one-time “mentor and friend”, Professor Phillip Tobias, the doyen of South African palaeoanthropology, whom he accuses of engineering a coup that saw his career fortunes suffer “the equivalent of a magnetic polar reversal”.
Berger saves his most scathing comments, however, for Ronald J Clarke, the department’s most senior researcher and, more particularly, the discoverer of St 573, the 3,3-million-year-old, nearly complete hominid skeleton and skull at the Sterkfontein caves. Clarke’s announcement of the discovery in December 1998 brought him wide recognition. It also shone a timely spotlight on the whole Sterkfontein valley just as it was being considered for World Heritage Site status. But it was enormously embarrassing to Berger, who six months earlier had fired Clarke for non- performance.
It was in the aftermath of that controversy that the university, acting on the advice of a scientific advisory committee, decided to split palaeoanthropology.
Berger’s Paleoanthropology Research Group (Parg), which he had inherited from Tobias and which had had jurisdiction over Sterkfontein, was closed.
Sterkfontein was placed in a separate unit under Tobias and Clarke. Berger was given a new unit, the Paleoanthropological Unit for Research and Exploration (Pure), and a new home at the Bernard Price Institute.
Berger has refrained from comment on his reasons for declining to renew Clarke’s annual contract. But in the book he makes up for his long silence.
The portrait he paints of Clarke is of a scientist whose career has been plagued by fall-outs and disputes; he portrays his former colleague and sometime collaborator as accomplished but difficult, secretive, possibly even unethical.
Clarke is widely respected as an anatomist and frequently described as the best in the world at the delicate business of fossil reconstruction. He has reacted to the book with anger, and suggested that he has no choice but to take legal action against Berger and The National Geographic Society, which is publishing the book as part of its new Adventure Press.
Clarke takes issue with almost everything Berger has written, starting with his introduction: “Clarke had come to South Africa from Tanzania following a fallout with Mary Leakey while working as a technician at Laetoli on the famous fossil footprint trail. He had lost his right to enter Tanzania by crossing the border from Kenya into Olduvai Gorge, without permission, to join an excavation. During this unauthorised foray, he was stopped by the Tanzanian authorities and prohibited from entering the country …”
Besides disputing Berger’s diminution of him as a “technician”, Clarke denies ever having a fallout with Leakey.
The story of his ejection from Tanzania, he says, is both misleading and inaccurate. He had been invited to Tanzania by that country’s Department of Antiquities, but refused entry because he had South African stamps in his passport – a common problem for all travellers during the apartheid era. Having obtained a “clean” passport from the British authorities in Nairobi, also common practice, he returned to Tanzania only to be confronted by the same border guards.
Berger writes that, “Ultimately, Clarke would have as stormy a time in South Africa”. Among the accusations he levels:
l Clarke purposely and recklessly sped up a National Museum excavation in the Free State to recover as many hominid remains as possible, when he’d learned he was not in line for reappointment to that dig, thus incurring “the wrath of some of the museum authorities”. Clarke says that he and others had in fact concluded the dig, which was archeological in nature, and that he had quit in order to take a position at Wits.
l Clarke used the platform of the Taung Diamond Jubilee in 1985 to launch a “personal attack” on his former employer, Mary Leakey. Clarke says there was nothing personal about it; he simply used the opportunity to clear up misconceptions about one of the Laetoli footprints.
l Tobias subsequently had Clarke declared “persona non grata” at Wits, and that Clarke left South Africa for the United States as a result. Both Tobias and Clarke deny this. Clarke says he and his wife, an archaeologist and an American citizen, went to the US so their daughter could be born there.
l Clarke had inappropriately kept fossils in his personal safe at Wits, including a clavicle that had never been catalogued. Clarke says the fossils in his safe were ones he was working on, which is standard practice. The clavicle in question, he said, he had found mislabelled in a box of other non-hominid bones, which, incidently, was how he had also found the now-famous “Little Foot” foot bones. He catalogued the bone immediately after finding it.
The list of accusations, and Clarke’s detailed refutations, is a long one. Berger says he ultimately fired Clarke for low productivity – unaware that all that time, in secret, Clarke was working on the skeleton. Had Clarke only told him about the discovery – as was required of someone in his position – things would have turned out differently, he says.
Clarke counters that it was a matter of trust, of respect and of management of the excavations at Sterkfontein. Clarke had been running the excavations at the caves since 1992, and had no interest in turning it over to someone he has openly described as an “upstart”.
Berger doesn’t dispute Clarke’s feelings. By his own account, he had arrived at Wits in 1989 as a postgraduate student, taken the department by storm with his energy and enthusiasm and risen in less than a decade to heir apparent to the venerable Tobias. Yet unproven as a scientist, he had suddenly been elevated over those older and more experienced – and vastly more published than he was.
In an interview before leaving for a 21- day tour of the US to promote his book, Berger said he understood how upsetting it might have been “to have a 32-year-old upstart like me appointed to a position like that”.
Nonetheless, he says, he was Tobias’s successor, which meant that, whether Clarke liked it or not, he was Clarke’s boss. He was also the primary fund-raiser for the scientific work being done, and, as head of Parg, had ultimate authority over Sterkfontein.
As for Berger, he places the blame for what has transpired squarely at the feet – or the foot bones – of the skeleton, saying it prompted Tobias to switch allegiances – from being Berger’s primary supporter to one of his harshest critics.
Whoever’s to blame, the situation seems to have left Wits stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“The decision to split palaeoanthropological activities … was an attempt to find a structural solution to the problem of existing tensions between individuals,” said the university’s vice-chancellor, Colin Bundy.
Not only has it not solved the one problem, the solution may have created a host of new problems, one of which is access to the fossils that remain in the anatomy department. Who has access to what remains a – sorry – bone of contention.
“I personally am saddened by a situation which sees the persistence of bad blood between academics in the same field,” Bundy said. “The scholars involved in this discord have brought great distinction to themselves, the university and their discipline. It would be tragic to see this dissipated.”
There are practical implications as well. Mark Read of the privately funded Palaeoanthropological Scientific Trust, which has paid for about 90% of human origins research in Southern Africa in recent years, describes the trust’s donors as “running for cover”, and increasingly hesitant to support scientists who spend their time fighting each other.
“Personally,” he said, “I’m sick of it.”