Professor Emeritus Phillip Tobias
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Professor Emeritus Phillip Tobias was a South African palaeoanthropologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He is known both for his vast body of work on South African hominid fossil sites, and his anti-Apartheid activism, which began in his student years, and continued throughout his professional career as an academic. Tobias was appointed to lead the Reference Group that supported one of the first human ancestor repatriations to Africa, this being the return of Sara Baartman to South Africa from France's Musee de l'Homme, and her subsequent reburial and memorialisation in her homeland in the Eastern Cape. His networks were critical in creating a bridge for dialogue between the Reference Group, the South African government and Musée de l'Homme.