Phillip V Tobias

Palaeoanthropologist; Professor Emeritus, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Phillip Tobias is a palaeoanthropologist, and Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and is widely regarded as one of the leading minds on the subject of human evolution. After receiving a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, he began post-graduate research at the University of Cambridge in 1955, where he became Nuffield Dominion Senior Traveling Fellow in physical anthropology. In 1956, he became Rockefeller Traveling Fellow in anthropology, human genetics, and dental anatomy and growth, and assumed his current role at Witwatersrand in 1959. He was Dean of Medicine at Witwatersrand from 1980 to 1982, Honorary Professor of Palaeoanthropology at the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research in 1977, and Honorary Professor in Zoology in 1981. During his career as a palaeoanthropologist he has excavated at all of the Sterkfontein caves in South Africa, and worked with Louis Leakey at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where he discovered and named the species Homo habilis.

Tobias is a prolific contributor to academic journals and other publications, having published over 600 articles, and has three times been nominated for a Nobel Prize. He won the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1997 and the Balzan Prize for Physical Anthropology in 1987.