Discovering Dorothea: The Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate

  • Karolyn Shindler
HarperCollins: 2005. 304 pp. £25 0002571382 | ISBN: 0-002-57138-2

The slightly blurred, somewhat ghostly figure caught in a pose of resolute determination on the cover of this book is a highly appropriate image and captures the essence of the subject. How do you write a biography of someone who left virtually no personal documents, but a wealth of published scientific articles? The author, Karolyn Shindler, faced this problem when she tackled the life of Dorothea Bate, a pioneering female palaeontologist who worked in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bate's interest in natural history and fossils began early, when she was about ten. It seems to have arisen spontaneously, rather than from the influence of any adult around her — this is often the way with palaeontologists and natural historians. The absence of any personal diaries, from any stage of her life, leaves unanswered questions, such as what motivated her initially, and what drove her to continue against a multitude of difficulties. Her initiative in beginning such daunting adventures as expeditions to remote and poorly resourced locations with only sporadic, sometimes unreliable, local support was exceptional, and leaves me feeling inadequate. What's more, it is clear that she had to face parental opposition and relative poverty from time to time. On the other hand, she received appreciative support from professional palaeontologists at the British Museum (Natural History) in London — male, of course — who recognized her unique contributions. If I have a criticism of Shindler's writing, it is that, in the early parts of the story, the difficulties are somewhat overemphasized to become almost tedious, whereas the successes are downplayed.

She was remarkable for more than being a female palaeontologist at a time when the discipline, and its locations, were male dominated. She also pioneered collecting from previously unexplored and almost inaccessible parts of several Mediterranean islands, discovering new species and faunas from the Pleistocene of the area, and demonstrating the idea, novel at the time, that island dwarfing of elephants and hippos occurred in parallel on several islands.

Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTIAN DARKIN

As Bate grew in experience and academic stature, she began to integrate evidence from many sites and faunas to infer climatic changes over recent millennia, at a time when such thinking was in its infancy. She later incorporated this evidence with new finds in archaeology and anthropology to place human remains in their faunal context. She was among the first to recognize that the animals associated with ancient human habitations could shed considerable light on human activities and ecology, and she brought ideas of climate change to bear on human evolution through the Pleistocene. I was previously unaware of her work (my work deals with Palaeozoic fossils), but my colleagues who work on Pleistocene or Quaternary material not only know of her but continue to use the material she collected. Her ideas and techniques were ahead of her time. Her extensive publication record began in 1901 and continued to grow in depth and understanding, and with undiminished energy, until 1955. Despite this, it was not until near the end of her life that she gained permanent paid full-time employment, at the British Museum (Natural History)'s site in Tring.

In her later endeavours, she developed friends and colleagues in the archaeological world, several of whom were also women, and some went on to be pioneers in other respects. Dorothy Garrod, for example, was the first woman professor at the University of Cambridge. It is as though archaeology was already seen as a field in which women could play a significant role.

This biography could perhaps be criticized for its lack of in-depth analysis of the subject's personality or psyche, or that bringing to attention a ‘forgotten woman in a man's world’ is passé in the early twenty-first century. However, I think the author is justified on other grounds. With almost all of Bate's personal records, such as diaries or photographs, having been lost, destroyed or perhaps never made, Shindler has focused instead on the work of a scientist of considerable ability, originality and resourcefulness. Perhaps it is today's almost voyeuristic obsession with the analysis of motives and feelings, and the cult of personality, that leads us to expect a biography to address such issues — especially as the subject is female, and therefore ‘ought’ to have recorded her innermost feelings. I certainly don't keep any such diaries, and I wonder how many of my fellow scientists do.

In this biography, then, we are dealing first and foremost with a scientific record. In the end, it is the results of her research — the new specimens, species and their descriptions — that stand the test of time. I am grateful to Shindler for bringing Bate and her work to my attention.