Tim D. White Interview (page: 2 / 5) Pioneering Paleoanthropologist	Print Interview

What was going on in the study of human origins when you started grad school at Michigan?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Tim White: We have almost cycles in paleoanthropology where you have a lot of discovery of fossils, followed by a lot of interpretation -- not so much discovery -- and these things change, depending on local circumstances in Africa, the number of folks working, and so on. In the early 1970s, we were in a cycle of great discovery, and this was happening to the east of what was then called Lake Rudolph, what's now called Lake Turkana. And the discoveries there were being made by Richard Leakey, who was the son of Louis and Mary. And Richard had literally opened this vast desert territory to paleoanthropological research. We had new stone tools, older stone tools, new hominid remains, and so forth. And these were just in the process of being announced and the interpretations were beginning. The field work that the Berkeley people were doing was a little bit to the north of that, where the Omo River comes into Lake Turkana. So lots of new fossils, and some new ideas, but at the University of Michigan, the people that I went to work with -- as I say, I wanted to go to Berkeley, I didn't necessarily choose Michigan for those people, but just to go to a place where people were working at least on this topic. I got to Michigan, and then there was a hypothesis that all of these new fossils could be arranged in a single line of evolution. It was called the "Single Species Hypothesis." And the advocates of this theory were from Ann Arbor, Michigan. There were two professors who became my professors there. And from day one, I thought they were absolutely wrong, dead wrong, about this. And one of the things that happens in academics is you have schools of thought that form, and this particular school of thought was very invested in this model, and very unwilling to let it go. Unwilling to the point that I felt they were channeling their graduate students to a particular point of view.

Like a cult of belief in a certain theory?

Tim White: Yes, very much so. And then we were expected, I think, to go out and represent our institution to the greater world by giving professional papers or writing articles and so forth. I would have absolutely none of it.

Did you hide your opinions?

Tim White: Well, no. Not very effectively anyway. I failed my exams in human paleontology as a result. By that time I was actually working with Richard Leakey. I'd started to work with him in Northern Kenya and had been in the field a couple of years. That was one of the good things the professors at Michigan did, was to arrange that opportunity for me, knowing that I wanted to do the field work, and I went off and worked as sort of a paleontologist-geologist.

Did your advisors at the University of Michigan feel like Richard Leakey's work was inconsistent with their point of view?

Tim White: The field work they thought was fine, because it brought lots of new skulls, which they interpreted as being representative of a single line. The Leakeys, of course, didn't think so, ever since the 1950s. Indeed, most people in the field really disagreed with the Michigan point of view. It was very much a "peripheral isolate" in terms of schools of thought.

To their credit, at least they didn't discourage you from working with the Leakeys.

Tim White: Not at all, because they weren't field workers. They were laboratory, analytical kinds of people.

They didn't think you'd be picking up subversive notions from the Leakeys?

Tim White: I don't know about subversive. They ultimately gave me a Ph.D., and the Ph.D. dissertation actually was about the existence of multiple lines. This happened fortuitously. In 1975, I was in the field with Leakey's team, and Richard himself didn't work much in the field in those days. He had a lot of responsibilities running the National Museum in Nairobi, so...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I worked with a man named Kamoya Kimeu. Kamoya is a Kenyan man who's found many, many of the Leakeys' fossils over the years. He's been honored extensively at the National Geographic Society and so forth, but he doesn't have a higher education at all. His higher education came in the desert. I learned a tremendous amount from Kamoya. We were out one afternoon with his crew in '75, and one of the guys there, Bernard Ngenyo, a young Kenyan guy -- again, you know, no formal education, not even a high school education -- and he found a skull eroding from one of the hillsides and started beeping on his whistle. He wasn't sure exactly whether it was a hominid or a monkey, 'cause it was still mostly buried when I came up onto the scene. And it was a nearly complete cranium of a Homo erectus that was just weathering out of the bank. And that was tremendous, because ultimately when that skull came out, it sort of was the end of the Single Species Hypothesis, because it had been found in this bed where there was a second line of hominid present, and not even the Michigan people could argue this anymore. So fortunately, a man who's now a colleague of mine at Penn State gave the news to my professors at Michigan that it was over.

So you were in Kenya at that time?

Tim White: I was in Kenya at the time.

How much time elapsed from that discovery to the point where you were able to write about simultaneous multiple lines of hominid development?

Tim White: Not long. I filed my thesis in 1977, two years later. So by that time, the Single Species Hypothesis, at least as it applied to the very early hominid material, had been falsified to everyone's satisfaction.

In some ways, this was a case of your being in the right place at the right time. Do you think that luck has had a role in your career?

Tim White: Absolutely, in many cases but...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think there is a common misperception of what it is that we field paleontologists do. Many people think that we just go out, wander around, and stumble on things. And we actually see this in almost every media report of a new fossil discovery. You know, "The team stumbled upon these new remains..." Believe me, we don't stumble around! You are looking at maybe that few seconds of actual discovery being luck. Luck, over whether you look in that direction, or that direction, and then down, and see the cranium. But that's the last couple percent. The 98 percent before that is the hard work of identifying where to walk in the first place, setting up the logistics to get these large teams of scientists into the field, finding out how old those fossils are by using all the geological dating techniques that we have, studying things in the laboratory for years and years and years. The last little bit is luck, but most of it is just plain hard work and determination on these fossil discoveries.

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