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26 April 2018 Photo Supplied
Pretzel-formed fossil of great evolutionary interest
Slab with holotype of Parapsammichnites pretzelifornic from the Urusis Formation, Namibia. Scale bar is 1cm.Picture was taken from Buatois et al., 2018.

The acclaimed scientific journal, Nature, recently published an article about a trace fossil in approximately 543-million-year-old rocks, which elucidates the evolution of the first animals that appeared on Earth and lived in the sea.  

Affiliated Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of the Free State (UFS) Prof Gerard Germs formed part of a team that conducted research with the aim of understanding how the evolution of the first multicellular animals came about and how the Cambrian explosion took place. Prof Germs is of great value to the team for his extended field geological knowledge.

An article which he co-authored was published in the Nature Scientific Reports. The title of the article is: “Sediment disturbance by Ediacaran bulldozers and the roots of the Cambrian explosion”. The international group of writers included authors from Canada, Spain and South Africa. 

Occurrence of the Cambrian explosion
Prof Germs explains the Cambrian explosion: “During the long (4.5-billion-year) history of the Earth, the first life originated and subsequently evolution of plants and animals took place from one-cellular organisms to multicellular vertebrate animals and seed plants. Approximately 573 million years ago the first multicellular animals appeared on the scene. Sometime afterwards, approximately 540 million years ago, a kind of explosion in the origin of many new animal species occurred. This explosion is known as the Cambrian explosion.”

The team studied Earth sediments which are somewhat older than the Cambrian explosion. Such sediments are approximately 573 to 541 million years old and form part of the Ediacaran (late Neoproterozoic) period.

“My discoveries of the past, of among others, the oldest animal with a carbonate skeleton (Cloudina) and of complex horizontal Cambrian-type “worm” tracks (treptichnids) in Ediacaran sediments of Namibia have demonstrated that the Cambrian explosion occurred more gradually than previously thought. This has recently been confirmed in the article that was published in the Nature Scientific Reports.”

Pretzeliformis bulldoze to search for food
According to the article there is evidence that   during the Ediacaran period   worm-like animals such as the Parasammichnites pretzeliformis were already so far developed that they, due to coelom development and size increase, for the first time in the history of the Earth, were able to disturb and bulldoze sediments.  In this way they were able to find a new food source in sea sediments. Bulldozing animals were previously thought to have originated only during and after the Cambrian explosion and not during the older Ediacaran.

“Another major aim of my cooperative research is to improve our knowledge of the geology of the Ediacaran to early Cambrian of South Africa and Namibia. We also intend to establish how the assembly of the supercontinent Gondwana took place. This improved knowledge can be of great future economic interest since large oil, gas and limestone sources occur in Ediacaran-age sediments outside South Africa”.

News Archive

‘Is the South African university curriculum ‘colonial'?’ asks Prof Jansen
2017-11-24

Description: Jansen readmore Tags: Prof Jonathan Jansen, colonial, university curriculum, western knowledge

From left; Prof Corli Witthuhn, Vice-Rector: Research; former Rector and Vice-
Chancellor of the UFS, Prof Jonathan Jansen; Prof Michael Levitt, and
Prof Francis Petersen at the celebration lecture at the UFS.
Photo: Johan Roux

One of the critical issues that emerged from the South African student protests during 2015 and 2016 was a demand for the decolonisation of university curriculums. 

A senior professor at the Stellenbosch University, Prof Jonathan Jansen, said the number of people, including academics, who joined the cause without adequately interrogating the language of this protest, was astonishing. “The role of social scientists is to investigate new ideas … when something is presented to the world as truth.” Prof Jansen was speaking during a celebration lecture at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein on 15 November 2017. 

Large amount of knowledge not African

He said the accusation is correct to a limited degree. “The objection, in essence, is against the centring of Western, and especially European knowledge, in institutional curricula.” There is no doubt that most of what constitutes curriculum knowledge in South African universities, and in universities around the world, derive from the West. “The major theories and theorists, the methodologists and methods are disproportionally situated outside of the developing world,” Prof Jansen said. 

The dilemma is, how will South Africa and the continent change the locus of knowledge production, considering the deteriorating state of public universities? “In the absence of vibrant, original, and creative knowledge production systems in Africa and South Africa, where will this African-centred or African-led curriculum theory come from,” Jansen asked. He says the re-centring of a curriculum needs scholars with significant post-doctoral experiences that are rooted in the study of education and endowed with the critical independence of thought. “South Africa's universities are not places where scholars can think. South African universities’ current primary occupation is security and police dogs,” Prof Jansen said. 

Collaboration between African and Western scholars
“Despite the challenges, not everything was stuck in the past,” Prof Jansen said. South African scholars now lead major research programmes in the country intellectually. The common thread between these projects is that the content is African in the subjects of study, and the work reflects collaboration with academics in the rest of the world. These research projects attract postgraduate students from the West, and the research increasingly affects curriculum transformations across university departments. There is also an ongoing shift in the locus of authority for knowledge production within leading universities in South Africa. Prof Jansen feels a significant problem that is being ignored in the curriculum debate, is the concern about the knowledge of the future. How does South Africa prepare its young for the opportunities provided by the groundswell of technological innovation? “In other parts of the world, school children are learning coding, artificial intelligence, and automation on a large scale. They are introduced to neuroscience and applied mathematics,” he said.

Prof Jansen said, in contrast, in South Africa the debate focuses on the merits of mathematics literacy, and what to do with dead people’s statues.

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