Mankind’s place in Nature: the Gale–Brimble years

The co-editorship of A. J. V. Gale and L. J. F. Brimble was blighted by the Second World War. Little remembered, they were nevertheless Nature men through and through, and presided over a difficult era in science and scientific publishing. They were hardly in office before war broke out.

The post-war years were particularly difficult. Subscriptions had plunged during the war, and the jovial and energetic Brimble had been hurt during a wartime bombing raid — an injury that would plague him for the rest of his life. The British empire was crumbling. But the Nature office was still standing, unaffected by the London blitz.

Indeed, Nature not only survived but continued as an international force in science, hosting the scoop of the twentieth century in the life sciences — Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA. But there were other strengths too, including the journal’s status as the preferred point of publication for major papers in palaeoanthropology.

A large proportion of the principal finds of hominid fossil remains have been first reported in Nature. Such discoveries have always been newsworthy, and the journal’s weekly publication schedule meant that the findings could be reported rapidly. The importance of Africa in the field, and the older reaches of the British empire, ensured that a major metropolitan journal was attractive to those working in remote parts. Nature lent its prestige to a field that, although full of interest for human beings, still consisted largely of old-fashioned fieldwork and interpretative morphology.

Many of the papers were written by anatomy teachers, practising doctors, civil servants and anyone else willing to do the necessary fieldwork. They were often merely letters rather than formal scientific papers. The journal’s willingness to publish such studies, at a time when experimental laboratory science increasingly dominated, gave the field of palaeoanthropology tangible credibility.

Raymond Dart’s February 7 1925 description and analysis of the ‘Taung child’, named by him Australopithecus africanus, was a milestone in the discipline, published under Richard Gregory’s editorship but which continued to reverberate through the Gale–Brimble years. The fossil’s combination of human-like facial features and small brain led Dart to call it a ‘man-ape’, an interpretation that found little favour within the scientific community. Dart’s paper restored Africa to the centre of palaeoanthropology, but his reading of his fossil’s significance attracted controversy for decades — a reminder that ‘classics’ are generally made, not born, and that journals present science in the making, not science completely made.

Australopithecus continued to command attention during the 1930s and 1940s, especially after Robert Broom found an adult form in 1936, and threw his weight behind Dart’s view that the ancient genus should be placed directly in the line of human evolution. Few fields in science have been subjected to more frequent reinterpretation, as new finds have accumulated, than palaeoanthropology. Shifting opinion can be documented from the pages of Nature, and Broom’s discoveries persuaded British-based scientists to come round to Dart’s original views. Sir Arthur Keith, initially an opponent, publicly recanted in the journal, even suggesting that these ancient forerunners of human beings should be called ‘Dartians’.

The palaeoanthropological papers of these years are almost uniformly discursive and anecdotal, in sharp contrast to the general tenor of Nature contributions. Despite this, they embodied passionate, deeply held beliefs about humanity and its defining characteristics. Was it a big brain, tool-making, bipedalism, or some other attribute that could be inferred from the findings and their associated circumstances?

Robert Broom, Arthur Keith, Wilfred Le Gros Clark and other workers in the discipline all frequently contributed to the journal during the Gale–Brimble years. But nobody made such an impact as Louis Leakey and his wife, Mary. As a result of their contributions, Africa as the evolutionary cradle of human beings was established at Olduvai.

The significance of the Olduvai Gorge was communicated to the wider world through the pages of Nature: the 1950s and 1960s were full of the fundamental finds made by the Leakeys and their colleagues at the site. Zinjanthropus (Australopithecus) boisei was uncovered by Mary and reported by Louis, followed by Homo habilis (with Tobias and Napier) — a toolmaker, who vindicated Leakey’s contention that the crude stones discovered earlier were actually tools. Leakey’s protégé Jane Goodall enriched the tool-using debate with her 1964 observations on living chimpanzees.

Mary Leakey and her son Richard continued to favour Nature in the post-Gale–Brimble period, as did (and do) many other palaeoanthropologists, but one final paper during that era deserves mention. In 1950, Kenneth Oakley and Randall Hoskins used the new technique of fluoride dating to put the final nail in the coffin of Piltdown Man, a fraud that had haunted human evolutionary studies since it was perpetrated in 1912. Oakley and Hoskins exploited the new science-based, direct-dating techniques to show that the Piltdown materials were of widely differing ages. Their paper shows the rigour of the physical sciences and points towards the interdisciplinary nature of human evolutionary studies today.

In his farewell leader (Nature 378, 521–523; 1995), John Maddox wrote that Louis Leakey was one author whose papers were never sent to referees, explaining that these attracted such strongly worded and diametrically opposite reviews that they should just be published anyway. A wise approach, it turned out, as Leakey’s papers opened the way for a stream of palaeoanthropological gems that continue to appear in Nature to this day.