The Bone Collector
Leigh-Anne Hunter meets a scientist with a few skeletons in his closet
“SORRY I’m late. I was dissecting a body,” Brendon Billings offers me his hand, still in its rubber glove, then picks up a gorilla skull from his desk and starts talking about how our brains determine the way we kiss. “Sorry, I’ve got so many ideas.”
Billings, 31, is a lecturer at the Wits School of Anatomical Sciences, and a palaeoanthropologist. “I don’t study dinosaurs, okay? I study humans, and animals for comparison.” He is responsible for 13 collections of anatomical marvels. One of these, containing around 1 500 specimens, is next to his office. His lab coat floats around his takkies as he bounds past bottled bats and boxes of bones. One crate is marked “polar bear”, another “human?”. One of his specimens is 800 years old. “I’m running out of space,” he says.
Then, “Want to see something cool?” He takes me to the Raymond Dart Collection of Human Skeletons. I can’t see anything. It’s dark as a crypt when we step inside, but I know there are more than 2 700 skeletons in the collection. Billings gropes along the wall for
I don’t study dinosaurs, okay?
the light switch, then leads me down a long aisle lined with crates. He pulls one out and cracks open the lid. “That’s what cancer looks like,” he says. It’s the first time I’ve held a human skull. It’s riddled with holes.
In 1959, after a pipe burst, staff waded through the water, collected the floating skeletons and left them on the roof to dry. The literature says: “Some were mixed and, consequently, many boxes contained remains of more than one individual.” Billings says: “Cataloguing can get tedious.”
And they keep adding more. You can bequeath your body to science for a year, after which it is disposed of according to your will, or you can leave it to the department entirely, in which case students dissect it for a year, then the tissue is macerated and the bones go to the Dart Collection.
SA’s medical schools have the best body-donor programmes on the continent, says Billings. “Every year our department retains about 70 to 80 specimens.”
Dating back about 90 years, this is the largest collection of its kind in Africa and the third-largest in the world.
Visiting experts from around the globe use it for research. “Many European medical schools are moving towards plastic models, so our institute is a treasure,” says Billings.
Damaged bones are stored in another musty chamber. Billings uses them in his lectures. “All medical students get a bone bag with at least half a skeleton.”
He takes me to the dissection hall, where I almost pass out from the smell of formaldehyde. Billings looks fine, but then he began his studies here 13 years ago. He grew up in Coronationville, west of Joburg. He is the first in his family to attend university. “Science was more interesting to me than joining a gang or taking drugs. Science answered questions I struggled with: What is my purpose? Does my pigmentation make me inferior?”
He says he was “hooked” after his first excavation. “Touching something that dated back millions of years was mystical. This field requires patience, serendipity, and the knowledge that every fragment, no matter how small, adds to understanding.”
We stumble upon a photo of Phillip Tobias, Billings’s early mentor. A bust of Dart surveys us from a chiffonier, sharing space with a mould of Mrs Ples’s brain.
“Things are changing,” says Billings. “For me, the question now is: are humans that unique? I don’t think so. I think the question of intelligence is a stupid one.”
When I ask if he has hobbies, he hands me a small ear bone. “I’m not sure what to say.” He smiles apologetically. “My life is science.”