Phillip Tobias,86, was internationally renowned for his work on human evolution.
Anthropologist Phillip Tobias, internationally renowned as an authority on human evolution has died.
South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, where Tobias studied and then taught and conducted research until the 1990s, said he died on Thursday in a Johannesburg hospital after a long illness.
Tobias's name was synonymous with research at the Sterkfontein caves near Johannesburg where an ape-man's skeleton - millions of years old - known as Little Foot was discovered, the university said.
The area, now a World Heritage site, is where over a third of all known early hominid fossils have been found.
Tobias started a programme of excavation at Sterkfontein in 1966, which is now the longest continuously active palaeoanthropological dig anywhere in the world, and has produced over 1,000 hominin fossils, the country's Gauteng Tourism Authority said.
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Source: Al Jazeera
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