Tree planted in memory of Professor Tim Partrdige at Sterkfontein Caves

December 9, 2011 – Bianca Bothma

Colleagues of the late anthropologist, geologist and climatologist Professor Tim Partridge paid a moving tribute to him yesterday, at the Sterkfontein Caves, on the second anniversary of his death.

Speaking at the memorial service, Professor Ron Clarke, who had worked with him since 1973 noted his passion for his work in the Cradle of Humankind. “It’s very appropriate that his ashes are going to be interred here among the dolomite rocks and limestone caves which he loved so much and to which he devoted a great part of his life.”

A yellowwood tree was planted near the entrance of the excavation site at Sterkfontein Caves and Partridge’s wife Susie Jordan scattered his ashes over the roots as they were being placed into the ground.

Professor Francis Thackeray worked with Partridge at the former Transvaal Museum and said that planting a tree for him was a symbolic gesture. “This is a sad but special moment, to plant a tree and to know that Tim can be associated with this living thing.”

Partridge contributed significantly to what we know today about fossils discovered in the Cradle of Humankind in terms of the chronology of humankind’s evolutionary journey. To learn more about his scientific contribution, read the abridged tribute below, written by another of Partridge’s colleagues, Professor Philip Tobias.

Tribute to Tim Partridge by Professor Phillip Tobias

December 13, 2009

Here was a man whose greatest gift lay in his ability to comprehend the broad picture of the history of the rocks, without compromising attention to detail. His work always started with good field evidence and he was quickly able, though his highly developed synoptic skills, to understand and interpret what it all implied regionally and globally.

If you wanted to know anything about the changes of African landscapes, and the processes that gave rise to them, it was Partridge the geomorphologist to whom you directed your enquiry. He was always unselfish in sharing his insights with others, students, research workers and simply interested people. He was especially fascinated by those great perturbations of the Earth’s crust, spoken of as tectonic movements, in the vicinity of the East African Great Rift Valley.

When he claimed that the vertical uplift of up to 2 000 metres that gave rise to the elevated plateaux of Eastern and Southern Africa, had taken place recently (since the Miocene chapter in this history of the past), he found himself at loggerheads with a cohort of international colleagues. They repeatedly denied that such continental uplift could have occurred so recently. Undeterred, Tim persevered and collected more and more evidence in support of his views, over 10 years or more. Eventually he was vindicated on the basis of his own and independent evidence. Thus, Tim belonged in that small group of African scientists who were responsible for premature discoveries, such as Raymond Dart’s (1925) claims for the Taung child skull and Alex du Toit’s ideas in Our Wandering Continents (1937). Thus, we can claim that Tim revolutionalised conventional wisdom on the geomorphic history of a large part of Africa.

Tim was confronted early by the difficulties of dating the South African cave sites from which the world’s richest supply of early members of the family man have been recovered. Yet he knew that to place these fossils in the correct sequence in time was crucial. From 1973 onwards, he doggedly broached these seeming intractable cave deposits. To his hands and his probing eyes, they came to yield their secrets of dating and of their places in the layers of these cave deposits. He was the first to provide firm estimates of the dates of such famous caves as Taung, Sterkfontein, Makapansgat and Swartkrans. This lifelong endeavour, and the breakthroughs that Tim achieved, made a fundamental contribution to the placement of the early hominids in time. Thus, he enabled us to link them to their ancient chums from East Africa. He revealed the circumstances of life, the environment and ecology, against which the development of humankind took place. It’s not surprising that he served as consultant to our palaeoanthropology Research Unit for nearly 40 years.

Tim’s agile mind wandered far beyond the confines of Southern Africa. He played a major part as a member of an international core project on past global changes. His endeavours included a North Pole-Equator-South Pole transect and also a southern continents transect, covering South America, Sub-Equatorial Africa and Australia. He was the leader of the Palaeoclimates Group of Southern Hemispheres set up by the International Union for Quarternary Research in which some 300 scientists from south of the Equator participated for over 10 years.

Here Tim came up with another revolutionary concept. He found evidence from researchers in Antarctica, in the Kalahari and in oceanic records from the North Atlantic, that major climatic events since the last part of the Ice Age were forced from high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere.

Even the massive discharges of icebergs from the ice sheets fringing the North Atlantic, he claimed, were initiated by an increase in the moisture-bearing winds blowing northwards across the Equator. Was this another premature discovery? It was the recipe as before! The highly original interpretation has its critics. Yet his suggestion that the Antarctic played a more important role in global climatic change then had hitherto been acknowledged is already being echoed by others and may yet play a major part in the study of global climate change.

I have said more than enough to show you that Tim Partridge, over more than 40 years, built a reputation among earth scientists that is unrivalled.

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