Here we are in 2001, the beginning of the 21st century. Can you give us some sense of the state of your field? Where are we now in paleoanthropology and the study of human origins?
Tim White: Right now we have come out of a decade of research going on in Ethiopia. This research has resulted in discoveries, I think, that were unanticipated ten years ago. We've extended, now, the time over which we know our ancestors -- our direct ancestors -- all the way back to 6 million years ago. We've done so with a series of discoveries, including a skeleton -- a lot of these are unpublished yet -- but we have a skeleton at 4.4 million years ago. That's a million-point-two years older than the Lucy skeleton. And you start to calculate the number of generations that that takes us back into the very deep human past. That's just tremendous.
So if anything, we're now sort of backlogged, with so many discoveries that have occurred, and at the same time it's a wonderful backlog to have, because you can understand things about the biology of these ancestors that were just inaccessible (a) without the fossils, and (b) without our knowledge from biology which is now being applied.
We can understand, by studies in developmental biology laboratories, about how hands grow to the shape that they've taken today. And when you look, for instance, at the hand of a human, we have these relatively short fingers and relatively long thumb. If you look at the hand of a chimpanzee, the fingers are much longer, the thumb is very much shorter. This is just because of development. The chimpanzee developmental biology is different from ours. And a lot of this goes back really right into biochemistry and right into genetics. So we live in very exciting times in biology, and the potential to apply these advances in biological knowledge to an interpretation of the fossil record, where we have an actual hand from 4.4 million years ago of a single individual. It's just mind-blowing. We're going to learn a tremendous amount about what that ancient world was like, due to these discoveries in Ethiopia, and discoveries in science in general.
Let's go back to the beginning of your career. You went from UC Riverside to graduate school at the University of Michigan, but that wasn't your first choice was it?
Tim White: I really wanted to go from the University of California at Riverside to UC Berkeley. Berkeley of course is the larger institution in the system, many more students, much more prestigious place, and in those days, more importantly for me, the folks there were working in Kenya and in Tanzania. So there were active field work projects. I always knew that I wanted to do field work in East Africa. Ever since those National Geographics came out, I'd wanted to do that. So I was dead set on getting in there. In my undergraduate years, I had learned that, whereas maybe a lot of the folks I was in college with were a lot smarter then I was, that if I worked really hard and spent those nights in the library, that I could also get A's in the classes, and I started to do that my last two years. So I had quite a good GPA, good record. I thought, "I'll get into Berkeley." Wrong! Did not get into the University of California at Berkeley.
Wasn't that devastating? Tim White: Yeah, it really was. I questioned seriously whether I wanted to do anything else, because there were no other programs in the United States that had field work in Africa in those days.
I had, on the advice of one of my professors -- now a good friend and close colleague of mine -- filled out an application to the University of Michigan. I filled it out in pencil, handwritten, sent it to Ann Arbor as sort of a... I think it was more of the professor's backup than mine, because it really, for me, wasn't any backup to Berkeley. As it turns out, if I'd gone to Berkeley, I most likely would not have gotten the faculty position at Berkeley that I hold now, and have held since graduate school. I went to Berkeley right out of graduate school. So now I'm in a position at Berkeley where I accept graduate students and I look at it, I'm sure, in a very different way.
Have you shared with any of your graduate students that you didn't get into Berkeley yourself? Tim White: Oh, everybody knows. It became kind of a joke in the department that I was in, that I couldn't get in as a graduate student, but I came in as a professor. You say that you could not have had your present position because Berkeley tends not to hire its own graduate students? Tim White: That's right. What was going on in the study of human origins when you started grad school at Michigan?
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?
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?
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...
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...
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.
What was the effect of this discovery of multiple simultaneous hominid lineages? What is happening in the field now as a result of this?
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?
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?
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!
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...
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.
You spoke of the need to develop scientific talent in countries like Ethiopia. How do you identify that young talent? What do you look for?
Tim White: What we need are people who, first and foremost, are patriots, who believe in country in a fundamental way. Not people who are interested in financial gain. Not people who are interested in leaving the place. People who have pride in their homeland, and it's only people like that that can give these countries a chance, whether we're talking about indigenous wildlife, indigenous cultures, or these antiquities that we're dealing with. The great threat, I think, to all of these things, particularly in Africa today, is corruption. Corruption has really brought a lot of these creatures to the point of extinction, is now jeopardizing a lot of the fossil sites. Corruption is very, very difficult to combat, and only people who are patriots are in a position to really stand up against it, and willing to fight against corruption. These are the folks that we need to identify.
But they still need to have some aptitude for scientific work, don't they? Tim White: Absolutely. How do you locate the scientifically able in a country like Ethiopia? Tim White: In countries that are trying to develop their educational systems but don't have the wealth and the resources to do so on a very broad scale, you often have a single university. For instance, Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. The competition among elementary school, junior high and high school students to get into that university creates a class of undergraduates that is pre-selected to be very bright and very motivated. What about your own university, Berkeley? What qualities do you look for in a graduate student?
Tim White: In the University of California at Berkeley, we have perhaps the top undergraduates anywhere in the country, or at least a sample of the top undergraduates. These people come to me, and they have career aspirations, and they often ask the question, "How do I get into this business? What do I do when I'm in graduate school?" They are career-oriented. And what I tell them is to forget about that and go with your passion, and if you don't have a passion for this, then leave it, because you will need a passion. The financial rewards will not be great, the rewards have to come at times of discovery. You have to be excited by being the only human on the planet to see something for the first time, to understand something for the first time. "Develop a passion" is what I tell them, and "Don't go into it unless you are passionate about it." I think that pretty much applies widely to all fields of scientific endeavor.
Is there also an inclination to take risks or ask difficult questions that comes along with that passion? Tim White: I think that comes with the passion, because if you have a passion to know, then you're going to be willing to ask the tough question, even if that question is maybe detrimental to you right at that particular moment. Maybe people don't like to be asked a tough question, but if you have to ask that question to get at the truth, and your passion drives you to ask that question, then that's a wonderful thing. I think that's right at the heart of scientific inquiry. You developed your own passion for archeology at an early age. Could you tell us a little about your childhood? Where were you when you were ten years old? Tim White: As a ten-year-old, I was living in a little town in Southern California, up in the mountains, a town called Lake Arrowhead. My father was a maintenance person on the highways up there, in a very small community. And as a ten-year-old I was fascinated with natural history in the San Bernardino Mountains. Already? Tim White: Already. How much do you think the landscape of your youth influenced you? Tim White: Tremendously.
We lived in those mountains that lie, really, between the coastal plain heading on out to the Pacific, and the desert behind, in the rain shadow of the mountains. So that offered opportunity for me, as a child, to work in all kinds of different environments, desert and mountains. It wasn't work in that sense. My work has become an expansion of my childhood in a sense. And that's really where it started. I started doing archeology very, very early, when I was a teenager in those mountains.
At what point did you give your childhood interest a name? Tim White: I'm not sure that I ever have.
What's interesting about the work that I do now is that it covers so many different fields. So I operate on some levels as a geologist, and on some levels as a biologist, and on others as a paleontologist. So I've never really been inclined to like labels. What I'm interested in is learning as much as I can about the past. Even as a child, even as that ten-year-old, I was fascinated on what came before. What was the history of these mountains? Who were the miners and the loggers and the explorers, and who came before them? And of course those were the Native Americans. And who came and what came before the Native Americans? Prehistoric mammals, as represented in the La Brea Tar Pits. I remember going there as a child and seeing these wonderful collections of saber-toothed cats and dire wolves and giant ground sloths. I was just fascinated in that world of the past, and how we might come to learn about it.
You say you visited the La Brea Tar Pits when you were a child. You must have had parents who believed in this interest of yours, just to get there. Was there encouragement in your family? Or was there disbelief at this level of fascination in a ten-year-old? What were your parents' attitudes during all of this? Tim White: I think more disbelief.
I can remember a session with my mother at the counselor's office at the high school. Of course, the high school I went to was a little tiny high school, and expectations... let's just say expectations were not terribly high. Most people stayed on the mountain and very few went to college. And those that went to college were warned, before they left to go to college, that it was way too hard and most people flunk out when they get there.
That's what they told you?
Tim White: We were told, "You know, you'd be very lucky to get into the University of California," and "Not many people who get in manage to stay there without flunking out." So all of that of course was in the future, and I went in with my mother to the counselor, and I remember the counselor saying, "Well, what are you interested in?" My grandmother had given me books on dinosaurs. I was fascinated by the old Colbert books, and I said, "I want to do this. I want to study dinosaurs." And both on the part of my mother and particularly the counselor, the answer was -- and I don't think you'd get this answer very much these days -- but in those days it was, "No. No, not really. People don't do that. There must be something more practical you can do. Of course you love natural history...." and so forth. Marine biology was becoming an interesting subject in those days, with the work of a lot of people in undersea vehicles and better accessibility. So I said, "Marine biology." And this was in, I think, junior high school, that this happened. I went on to leave that high school and go to the University of California at Riverside. I entered in a biology major, still thinking that I would go on and become a marine biologist.
While you were still in high school, was there a teacher who encouraged your interest, or a particular experience that inspired or influenced you?
Or with the Web, for that matter. Tim White: That's right. Those magazines came and opened that world to us, and the Geographic has done an outstanding job subsequently, in using all of these other media: film, Web and so forth. But in those days, it opened that possibility to me. I was just fascinated by that. So I think there the influence was very, very strong. So let's follow you to university. You're a freshman biology major at UC Riverside, a very good university. Did you tremble before this awful prediction of how tough the university was, or did you just jump in and find it was like breathing air? Tim White: It wasn't any of the above, actually. I arrived, and the people I was in college with were very smart people from very good backgrounds, and since folks were surprised that I managed to stay there without flunking out, it was really okay. Because people had low expectations of you? Tim White: Very low expectations, and I found it pretty easy to meet those expectations.
For the first couple years, I was a biology major, and I got C's and a few D's in chemistry and physics. And then I took my first anthropology class when I was a junior in college, an introductory class. And ended up -- by that time I'd done a lot of archeology -- and the archeology teaching assistant in the class, a graduate student, was telling me things that I knew were not true. So I was able to engage in a debate with a teaching assistant, based on my field experience. And the teaching assistant, I remember saying, "Don't bring that argument in here. You're here to learn from me." At which point I said, "Thank you very much, I don't have that much to learn from you," and I left. I went directly to the professor, who it turns out today, he's a good friend of mine. He's our country's leading radio-carbon dating archeologist, and we've had a great relationship ever since. And he just said, "Come to the lectures. Don't worry about the discussion sections." And that was my introduction to anthropology. And what I did was to add it as a second major.
Let's talk about temperament for a moment. That was kind of a risky thing to do, taking on this individual. Do you find yourself doing that often? I mean, if you hear nonsense, you say so. Tim White: Yeah. I have a reputation for that. Didn't you think twice about that?
When did you figure out that you could do this full-time, and that there was a future for you in the broader field of anthropology and archeology? How did you get from that introductory course to a life choice? Tim White: There really never was one.
I took, as an undergraduate a series of courses that didn't, at first glance, have a lot to do with what I ended up doing. I particularly liked the paleontology classes, and anthropology, as a discipline, often hasn't encouraged folks to go out and take biology, geology, paleontology, and incorporate those things into an anthropology curriculum. I was interested to do all of that, but that left me, by the time I got to the end of my undergraduate career, left with me a couple of majors but not really a clear career path, if you like. At that point I went to the University of Michigan to do graduate school, and found myself in another great environment, with an intersection of museums dealing with geology and paleontology and archeology.
You went to Michigan after getting turned down by Berkeley. It worked out for the best, but it must have seemed like quite a setback at the time. How do you cope with disappointments and reversals like that?
Tim White: I think that the graduate school experience, the not getting into graduate school really caused me to stop and say, "Well, wait a minute. If I'm not going to be able to do what I want to do, which is to go and do field work in East Africa, and contribute to this ongoing quest for knowledge of our past, then maybe I'll look at different options." I think the story of all of that though, is that you often don't realize what other options there are. There are multiple pathways to the same objective, and if you carry that passion with you, you'll be able to find those pathways.
Thank you, Dr. White. Tim White: You're welcome.
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