Tim D. White Interview (page: 3 / 5) Pioneering Paleoanthropologist	Print Interview

What was the effect of this discovery of multiple simultaneous hominid lineages? What is happening in the field now as a result of this?

Tim White: Well, that 1970s burst of discovery really was the culmination of finding that, definitively, there were a couple of different lines. People started to put together sort of an evolutionary history, with fossil evidence that now stretched to the bottom layers of Olduvai Gorge, at around two million years ago, and at this site of Richard Leakey's in Northern Kenya, also into that sort of two million time range. There were a lot of controversies about dating the fossils for many years. Then began another round or cycle of discovery that really started -- oh, I suppose as part of the first cycle -- but it really peaked in Ethiopia in the mid to late 1970s.

And you were there again?

Tim White: Not exactly. I was working with Mary Leakey, and she'd been excavating at Olduvai for many, many years, and was interested in writing up all of those discoveries that she'd started with Louis back in the 1960s. It was 1975, and this man Kamoya had come down to visit her, just on a visit to Olduvai, where he started off as a worker, decades earlier. He went out to a place called Laetoli. Everybody knew about Laetoli. It's been known since the 1930s. Kamoya went out, and the great fossil hominid finder that he is, he and the guy with him found some hominid fossils. The dates on those came back at 3.75 million years. So all of a sudden, we'd almost doubled the time period across which we had good fossil evidence in Eastern Africa. This happened in 1975, 1976, and was right after the discovery of the Lucy fossil by Don Johanson in Ethiopia.

Were you involved in that discovery?

Tim White: Well, it's a funny way that I got involved in that. I was working on Mary's fossils. She asked me to describe these new remains from Tanzania, and this was at the same time that Johanson was finding and publishing the remains from Ethiopia. It turns out that they were also older than the material from Olduvai Gorge. So here we had these two collections of fossils, and we began to compare them in the museum in Nairobi, and then later in Cleveland. So we published a lot together on those remains and the significance of them.

You were already involved in these very important discoveries while you were still a graduate student. Take us to the next stage of your life. You've got your Ph.D. from Michigan. Where are you in your career?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Tim White: I'm a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, just having arrived when these fossils of Mary Leakey's in Northern Tanzania that are footprints left in a volcanic ash are first found in 1977. And in '78, just as the analysis of Lucy -- the bony parts -- is being done by Johanson and myself, I go off to the field to work with Mary on these fossilized footprints, which are tremendous because they show you behavior. They show you how the creature walked at 3.75 million (years ago). And fortunately, the discovery of these footprints was made at a time where we were prepared to excavate them carefully and reveal all of their detail onsite, and just at the time that the Lucy skeleton had been finally published and was available to the scientific community. It really rounded out the story of what our ancestors were like between three and four million years ago. So that had been fairly set, let's say by the mid-1980s, and indeed, through the '80s was a sort of a lull in the actual finding of fossils in Eastern Africa. A lot of interpretation going on. The publication of Lucy and the footprints led to tremendous controversy in the field. How many lines are represented by these fossils? Some of our colleagues in France thought there were three. How did they walk? Well, the footprints solved that to many people's satisfaction, but other people said, "No, look at this big toe. It's a little bit splayed. We're not quite sure..." and so controversy over this material went on.

In the '80s, another thing happened that slowed the production of fossil hominids. The research in Ethiopia -- which really is the country, I think, with the greatest potential still today to solve these many mysteries of human evolution -- that country was shut down to all paleoanthropological research.

What a tragedy!

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Tim White: A lot of things happened in that part of the Ethiopian history, but what the government decided to do was to stop all of the research until they had a series of regulations in place that would ensure national development. As a person working in Kenya and in Tanzania over those years with the Leakeys, I became, really, I suppose you'd say, "sensitized." Very, very conscious of the fact that the local infrastructure was not being built adequately. A lot of people were coming in from overseas, getting Ph.D. degrees, but very little was being done in terms of developing the nation's capacity to handle these resources, which are very, very fragile and irreplaceable resources. But that's often overlooked by people who come in from outside. So what we did at Berkeley in the 1980s was to try to identify young Ethiopian scholars and to bring them into this science, to develop them as scientists, and to develop an infrastructure to support them in Ethiopia.

You yourself came from a background where a scientific career was not automatically assumed. Did you find that experience useful in understanding the needs of students who might need something more than the usual educational development?

Tim White: Absolutely. In Ethiopia, when that research opened up again in the 1990s, we worked with people who were nomadic pastoralists. Just to give you an example...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There's a large village that we work near. The chief of that village is a close friend of mine. He's learned English from this field project. He walked into camp in '92 and couldn't speak a word of English, and now he could sit down and have this conversation with you. He has an eight-year-old boy that we've put into an English school where he's learning English. They understand that's their future, and that's down on the level of the local nomadic pastoralists. We're dealing also in Addis Ababa with museum infrastructure, with people in the universities and so forth. Tremendous growth is needed here, because until and unless we put into place people who understand the value and the fragility and the fact that these resources are irreplaceable, the resources are actually endangered. A lot of these countries want to bring in foreign exchange, the tourism, for example. But that sets up the stage for things that we've seen in other countries, where the local people who live in abject poverty are going out and picking up these fossils and selling them to tourists. We lose the "position of fall." We have no idea where these come from. So what we want to do on the national level in Ethiopia is to develop this sense of curatorship of these antiquities.

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