Finding the ape within

At the Johannesburg Zoo, John Gurche watches a troop of chimpanzees, searching for the ghosts of our ancestors.

These ghosts might reveal themselves in a toothy grin or an ambling gait, a trait shared with a common ancestor millions of years ago, and the stuff Gurche can use in a reconstruction.

In his sketchbook, Gurche has captured a chimpanzee baring its teeth in what is known as a fear grin. He is considering using the expression on a hominin he is illustrating for the National Geographic Rising Star expedition.

"You need to understand apes in a detailed way," he explained.

Gurche is a US palaeoartist and he is in South Africa to give the 10th Standard Bank/PAST Phillip Tobias memorial lecture, titled The Ancestral Connection: Portraits of our Prehistoric Human Family, tomorrow. He'll discuss paintings, sculptures and sketches he has done of hominins and dinosaurs.

His work has appeared in National Geographic and he was a consultant on Steven Spielberg's movie Jurassic Park. He has worked on portraits of all our known forebears, and 15 of them are in the Smithsonian museum's new Hall of Human Origins.

Getting it right means talking to lots of scientists and poring over academic journals.

His work is part art, part science, he said. "It is a tightrope. You don't want to violate the science."

As new discoveries are made, ideas on how our ancestors moved and looked change.

Homo floresiensis, or the Hobbit, - is a case in point. Current science points towards Homo erectus as the Hobbit's ancestor, but it is possible a link to a more primitive hominin may be found. "If we do find this primitive ancestor, I might have to go into the Smithsonian and change her nose," Gurche said.

Gurche's lecture is at the Great Hall at Wits at 6.30pm tomorrow. Entrance is free