The first person to describe a new fossil gets the rights to name it. This has got be done at the time of the first publication as the privilege is not retrospect. Hesitate and someone else will pip you at the post. The payout is pretty impressive because the once the fossil has been named, the name is there forever with your priority stamped all over it in Latin.

But not everything in the name game is about priority and bragging rights. The whole system of classification is an art, not a science, and the choice of name tells you as much about the researcher as it does about the fossil.

Lee Berger and his team have just had the rare opportunity to name a new hominid species.  They have chosen the name Australopithecus sediba for the debut of the fossils from Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind and the new taxon is on the tip of the tongue of lots of South Africans, from the Deputy Minister of Technology to the kids in school who have been given the chance to give a popular name for the fossils.  

So what is in the name? What statement has Lee Berger made with his choice?  In fact, he has made two statements, one that concerns the genus name Australopithecus and the second concerning the species name sediba.

Let’s start with the easy one: sediba.  The language is seSotho and the meaning is ‘wellspring’ or ‘fountain’. Not a bad choice at all. Making use of one of the indigenous languages of South Africa is a smart move if South Africans are going to ‘take ownership’ of this new specimen. If Berger really wanted to go back to ‘roots’ for the name, he could have chosen one of the ‘Bushman’ languages for inspiration in the same way that we have for our national motto. It reads: !Ke e: /xarra //ke, and means “Unity in Diversity” or more literally “Diverse People Unite” in the extinct language of the /xam. In fact, an extinct language is exactly what is needed for national motto as you don’t want confusion about the precise meaning and a dead language never changes. But seSotho is not only very much alive, it is the first language of 4 million South Africans and a second language of nearly the same number. This is about claiming heritage for the living, not the dead, and Berger’s selection is a good one.

The choice for the genus name needs to be viewed from a cold scientific perspective. Choosing a genus name is about linking the specimen to other discoveries and it plants a flag at a point on the evolutionary road. The specimens from Malapa were clearly related to other fossil forms from around the same age, so the choice was not about a new name, but it was about deciding which name to link it to. In the end Berger chose Australopithecus rather than the more controversial Homo. It doesn’t sound like it, but this is pure philosophy, not science.

Had Berger chosen Homo, he would have been recognising human-like attributes in the bones implying that they were ‘real men’ and not ‘ape men’.  The accepted consensus is that Homo had the ability to make tools, manipulate the environment, probably used speech, and, in Phillip Tobias’s words, was at a “new level of organisation”. But Berger has chosen to lump his new fossils into Australopithecus, meaning that his new discovery had not yet reached Tobias’s new level of organisation.  

But Berger hasn’t quite excluded his new specimens from the human line because the species name sediba implies that his species is at the point of transition from Australopithecus to Homo. Berger is quite up front about this. In his opinion, his discovery is the root of humanity as we know it.

Well this is where the fun in science begins. There has already been some debate about Berger’s claims. The fossil seems too late in time to be at the origin point for Homo. There are also other candidates and the anatomically oriented anthropologists will need to discuss the meaning of the morphology of the new specimens in the light of the detailed anatomy of its predecessors and contemporaries. As I have always told my students, the best thing to do is to wait when a new discovery is made and affinities are proclaimed. It will take at least 5 years for the consensus to develop and much academic blood will be probably be shed in the process.

Note: Read Prof Morris’s article on Australopithecus sediba appearing in the South African Journal of Science.

The common thread between all universities is that they are centres of debate and independent and critical thinking. In this issue, Nithaya Chetty discusses the threat that the suppression of academic freedom poses to South African universities, and raises his concerns regarding their corporatisation; and an associated marginalisation of the views of academics.

 He points out that there is a widely-held view in South Africa, that academic freedom is a front for the perpetuation of elitism, and resistance to transformation. He thus argues that in order for our universities to protect academic freedom, it is essential for them to embrace valid processes of transformation.

Read more:  S. Afr. J. Sci. 105 (9/10), 325 – 327.

South Africa’s gold production: not worth its weight in gold?

South Africa’s gold mining industry continues to be a major economic force in the country, but it is not nearly as important  as it used to be. South Africa has, for example, recently fallen into second place behind China in the world ranking of gold producing countries. Despite this decline in production, South Africa still claims first place in the world ranking of gold reserves.  Hartnady discusses the credibility of this claim using a critical analysis of gold production on the Witwatersrand. He argues that the Witwatersrand goldfields are 95% exhausted, and that it is time to examine the benefits of a declining industry against the costs to the environment.

Read more:  S. Afr. J. Sci. 105 (9/10), 328 – 330.

Possible termite fossils in South Africa

The range of possible trace fossil architectures found in the Lower Jurassic sandstones in the Karoo region is reported for the first time in this issue by Bordy et al. The architecture of these sandstone structures indicates that they are fossils of an early Jurassic social insect, and they may be the best preserved social insect traces from the former Gondwana reported to date. This discovery in South Africa, together with an increasing number of fossils attributed to termite origin in North America, suggests that sociality in insects originated in the early Mesozoic, before the breakup of Pangea, which would explain their worldwide distribution today.

Read more:  S. Afr. J. Sci. 105 (9/10), 356 – 362

Fire management in threatened fynbos

Brian van Wilgen reviews current and historical fire management practices in fynbos. In fynbos, burning was initially considered to be destructive and prevented where possible. But gradually, as the vital role of fire in fynbos ecosystems became better understood, managers turned to prescribed burning and experimented with different space and time protocols. Despite these policies of prescribed burning, wild fires remain the dominant feature in fynbos, fortunately driving a variable fire regime that remains broadly aligned with conservation objectives. The problem of conserving fire-adapted fynbos is complicated by invading alien trees that are also fire adapted. Despite improvements in control methods, alien trees, notably pines, continue to spread almost unchecked. Biological control offered some hope for controlling pines, but was ruled out as too high a risk for these commercially important trees. Failure to address this problem adequately will almost certainly result in the severe degradation of remaining fynbos ecosystems.

Read more: S. Afr. J. Sci. 105 (9/10), 335-342.