Vice Chancellor and Principal, Prof Adam Habib;
Director of the Evolutionary Studies Institute, Prof Bruce Rubidge;
Members of the media; and Distinguished guest.
Good evening to you all. It gives me great pleasure to see that the Palaeontological Society of Southern Africa is reaching out to make science a public issue.
The media has already dubbed you affectionately “fossil hunters”. And you have one of the best places on earth to hunt for fossils.
South Africa has a unique archaeological heritage. Together with research excellence and experience in the field, we are in pole position in international
research in the palaeosciences.
The DST’s National Research and Development Strategy of 2002 prioritises areas of research that are potentially world-class and identifies palaeontology as one of South Africa’s key science missions.
Wits University has a long and proud tradition of research in the palaeosciences and has, as most of you will know, recently amalgamated its two longstanding palaeontological Research Institutes, the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research and the Institute for Human Evolution, into a single large institute known as the Evolutionary Studies Institute. The Evolutionary Studies Institute is our country’s premium custodian of major fossil collections of international significance and the owner of two major fossil hominid sites (Swartkrans, and Sterkfontein), and is the central training facility for palaeontological research and education in South Africa.
We all long to know our deep-time ancestors. Luckily, here in South Africa those ancestors are in our own backyard. Sites like the Cradle of Humankind have given us snapshots of some of our earliest days, and new discoveries by South African scientists like Lee Berger have increased the body of knowledge in this field of science.
But it’s not just the Cradle of Humankind that’s enriching our deep-time history. Fossils from the Great Karoo reveal that South Africa is the Cradle of just about everything. Indeed, today’s safaris owe everything to the ancient crocodiles, mammals, and dinosaurs that walked South Africa a long time ago. Scientists, like Bruce Rubidge, are bringing that ancient menagerie to life.
To know our ancestors, we must also get to know our celestial neighbours. Our guest speaker, Dr. Kevin Hand, is searching for life in our own solar system.
Here in South Africa, the universe has been getting to know us for a long time. The 2 billion year old Vredefort Impact crater, a World Heritage Site, records a time when a 10km wide asteroid struck South Africa carving a hole from here to the Free State.
Smaller impact craters at places like Morokweng and Tswaing are remnants of more recent close encounters with the universe. And yet our resourceful Stone Age relatives used the products of these close encounters as resources, hunting for game in the hills of the Vredefort Dome and gathering salt from the Tswaing crater lake.
I am proud to say that science based here in South Africa is leading the way for understanding our role in the history of life and in the future of the Universe.
Our investment in science and technology research is providing for our future – the discoveries made by the Evolutionary Studies Institute and the Square Kilometer Array teams are causing a surge of interest in biology, geology, and physics at local universities, and attracting top students and academics from around the world to South Africa.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. We cannot meet in this conference at Wits and neglect to mention Phillip Tobias, he was a man who allowed us, in the words of Isaac Newton, “to see a little further”. His death in 2012 marked the end of an era. His influence stretched further than any other South African scientist. A lot has been written about him since his death. I would like to add a word about his humanism, his courage in writing about race, and his opposition to apartheid.
I can remember reading his little pamphlet on race in the 1970s. I know now that he had written it much earlier and that what I read was a South African Institute of Race Relations expanded version. But it made me see further. It helped me to understand. “I should be failing, therefore, in my academic duty,”he wrote, “if I were to hold my peace and say nothing about race, simply because the scientific truth about race runs counter to some or all of the assumptions underlying or influencing the race policies of this country”. (Tobais, 1972). That commitment to the truth came out of an active involvement in politics. He was president of National Union of South African Students in the late 1940s and championed the idea of non-racialism in South African universities.
He learned his politics young and he retained his convictions throughout his long life. To Tobias,” Andrew Morris has written “the goal was always the vision of a non-racial South Africa where both the value of science and human rights lived side by side.”
I hope this conference will assist to explore how this Firmly African influenced’ area of Science can be made more public and accessible as Africa’s contribution to humanity and to world Knowledge. Palaeontology is in a unique position to enhance Africa’s pride in knowledge creation – I believe an Origins Museum in Africa drawing together the vast Knowledge on Human Origins should be considered and established by government. It could become the Smithsonian of South Africa.
In conclusion, the scientists present have made an enormous contribution to Knowledge, I hope that they could from this conference begin a process of sharing their knowledge with all the people of South Africa.
