Hans Hofmann
[body]/note>Hans Hofmann helped ring in the golden age of paleontology in the early 1960s when many evolutionary questions were being answered about the vast unknown stage of life that existed before animals were capable of leaving behind a trace of themselves in fossils.
Although trained as a geologist, he spent his career searching for and finding evidence of early life in very ancient rocks. His discoveries helped the geological and paleontological world fill in gaps in the little-known Precambrian era, a time period that stretches roughly from 540-million to 4.5-billion years ago. His work had him delving into the micro-organisms that predated more advanced species. Jokingly, Hofmann liked to compare his research to "being the window-washer in an underground parking garage," according to his former student Guy Narbonne, research chair in paleontology at Queen's University in Kingston.
The pioneering scientist, who taught at the University of Montreal for 31 years and maintained a research office at McGill University during the last decade, died of a heart attack in Montreal on May 19 at the age of 73.
He was considered by many to be Canada's most important paleontologist. Besides publishing more than 100 refereed scientific papers, delivering as many conference presentations and some 200 keynote addresses at scholarly meetings around the globe, he won several distinguished prizes.
In 1980, he received the Billings Medal from the Geological Association of Canada. Usually a lifetime achievement award, he earned it as a young scholar, only 44 years of age. Fifteen years later he was awarded the Willet Green Miller medal of the Royal Society of Canada for "outstanding research in any field of the earth sciences." Finally, in 2002 he became the only Canadian to win the Charles Doolittle Walcott medal of the U.S. National Academy of Science for outstanding "individual achievement in advancing knowledge of Precambrian life and its history."
In Australia in the late 1990s, with colleagues Kath Grey and Arthur Hickman, both now senior researchers at the Geological Survey of Western Australia, he discovered 3.45-billion-year-old stromatolites, trace fossils of bacterial communities. They were the oldest known in the region and the paper about the discovery, for which he was the lead author, made it to the cover of the Geological Society of America Bulletin.
He found microfossils from 2-billion years ago off the east coast of Hudson Bay, disc-life fossils from 650-million years ago in the Northwest Territories, and discovered key reserves of fossils in Newfoundland, Ontario, northern Quebec and the northern Rockies.
Applying a scholarly rigour to a field that had often attracted over-confident scientists offering up dubious fossils, Hofmann used biology, chemistry and physics to analyze his own work and often to disprove other scientists' finds. He also invented classification techniques on ranking fossils and organizing time spans.
"He brought Precambrian paleontology out of the dusty 19th century," said Guy Narbonne, who began his career working as a postdoctoral fellow under Hofmann.
When Hofmann began to study paleontology in the 1960s, there was a century-old mystery that needed solving. Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, published in 1859, had acknowledged that no fossils had been found that dated back more than 500 million years. This lack of physical evidence made it harder for Darwin to prove his theory of evolution. In Darwin's day, the oldest fossils known were lobster-like organisms, with legs, feelers and eyes - all much too evolved to be the earliest forms of life.
Sir John William Dawson, one of the first principals of McGill University, was a noted geologist who had made his name with the discovery of early amphibians and reptiles in Nova Scotia. A steadfast creationist, he had written in 1865 about a fossil he had found on the banks of the Ottawa River that he claimed was more than twice the age of any life form previously found , leading him to claim it as a "special creation" and using it to disavow Darwin and his theory of evolution. (Dawson's fossil discovery was later proven to be a mere mineral structure.)
"It was Hans Hofmann who sealed the case," colleague Bill Schopf, a professor of paleobiology at UCLA, told attendees at Hofmann's memorial service in Montreal in late May. "He contributed more to the discovery and understanding of especially ancient, Archean, microbe-formed stromatolites than any one who has ever lived."
Schopf later explained that missing from Darwin's day was the fossil record of microscopic organisms such as tiny bacteria and cyanobacteria, often referred to as pond scum. And it was with those micro-organisms and the stromatolites they built, that Hofmann made his very large contribution.
Hans J. Hofmann was born on Oct. 3, 1936, in Kiel, a port town in northern Germany, the first child of Johanna and Willi. His father worked as a travelling bicycle parts salesman and moved the family to Frankfurt, where they were living when the Second World War broke out.
There, the family saw their apartment building bombed, forcing them to move to Rumpenheim, a rural town just outside Frankfurt, where Hans' younger brother Frank was born in 1941. There, the occasional Allied bomb would fail to explode in the mud of the marshy landscape. That same year, Willi had to leave them to serve as an army mechanic on the eastern front.
In 1943, Johanna and the two boys moved to a nearby farming village, Eschenrod, where Hofmanns had lived since the late 1600s and relatives could offer them food and comfort. They found some peace in the pastoral landscape of rolling hills and red-roofed white houses along the Main River, where their location was of little strategic importance to those planning bombing sorties.
Able to roam around with little adult supervision, Hans discovered his love for the outdoors among Eschenrod's farms and orchards. He began to keep a butterfly collection and developed a passion for model airplanes.
Willi, who had arrived home safely after the war ended, became increasingly worried that his sons would be drafted into the German military. In 1951, he emigrated to Canada to work and save money, hoping to resettle the family.
In 1952, the four were reunited in Montreal, but not for long. The two boys worked that summer on a farm in Quebec's Eastern Townships to help the family earn some money. By the fall, Hans was attending Rosemount High School in east-end Montreal, but with little English and an inherent shyness, his grades suffered. He was forced to repeat Grade 11, the final year of high school in Quebec.
By the next school year, Hans focused hard on his studies, his family usually seeing a closed bedroom door. That same year, he also took part in an air cadets program. His commanding officer, Fred Legg, was a kind man. He helped Hans and his brother Frank with their English on the weekends and displayed none of the anti-German attitude that was pervasive at the time.
Hans did very well in both his studies and his air cadet training. In 1954, he earned a scholarship to McGill and became the first German immigrant in postwar Canada to earn a pilot's licence.
He took up geology, earning his BSc and the Logan Gold Medal for an undergraduate with "an excellent academic standing" in 1958. By the time he was 26, he had also earned his Masters and a PhD at McGill. "Geology was such a natural fit for my father and he had so much passion for it," his son Thomas said in a eulogy for his father. "He loved to do research, collecting samples, taking photographs and sharing his work with others."
For Hofmann's doctoral work at McGill, his supervisor was the legendary T.H. Clark, considered by many to be Canada's greatest geologist of the 20th century. Under Clark, Hofmann focused on the stratigraphy and fossils of the Ottawa-St. Lawrence Valley. Soon after, he received his first academic appointment at the University of Cincinnati, but after three years, and despite the efforts of his university administrators, he could not get his green card and had to return to Canada, where he was hired in 1966 by the Geological Survey of Canada.
For that work, Hofmann travelled wide swaths of the country, working with geologists and making discoveries, often along the Canadian Shield. It was in the Belcher Islands, in what is now Nunavut, that he found the 2- billion-year-old bacteria beds. They were commemorated on a 39-cent postage stamp in 1990.
"He discovered vast areas of the Northwest Territories. It was Precambrian heaven," said Schopf, who saw the 1960s as a golden era for paleontologists, when people like himself, Hofmann and others were making new finds all the time.
Hofmann's love for the outdoors held him in good stead in the difficult conditions he often had to endure on discoveries. On a research trip, he would spend extended hours carefully perusing thousands of rocks for clues and smashing through layers of rock bed. He would then work at night writing up his field notes in a tent.
He remained a strapping man throughout his life. Narbonne, who collaborated with Hofmann in Precambrian research for nearly three decades, remembers in 1989 being with Hofmann, who was then in his early 50s, on Bluefish Creek, NWT. Narbonne was two-thirds the way up a cliff, with Hofmann directing him from the bottom to a bed where he spotted a telling surface under the overhang. Once Narbonne confirmed Hofmann's suspicions, his colleague, who was almost 20 years his senior, was up on that cliff in what he figured was 40 seconds. They made a discovery dating back about 640-million years.
On his trips, he loved cooking outdoors, not shaving and living in tents. His penchant for roughing it even extended to the great ice storm of 1998, his son recalled. "It gave him an excuse to stomp around in heavy boots, heat up cans of beef stew in the kitchen using a candle and to skip bathing for a few days."
While Hofmann published prolifically in his career, he made a point of maintaining more than a two-decade boycott of Precambrian Research, the most important journal in his field. He was protesting against what he saw as unfair subscription prices.
That boycott did not stop him from publishing, popularizing and sharing his research wherever else he could. For Schopf, Hofmann was a selfless researcher who never tried to push a dubious theory: "He would find evidence and interpret it honestly." He had just completed a paper on western Canadian Precambrian fossils before his death. It was submitted to the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences and is being steered through its review by Narbonne.
In 2000, University of Montreal's Geology Department closed, leaving Hofmann without a home. He was given adjunct professor status at McGill and the Redpath Museum, where he remained an active researcher for the rest of his life.
Hofmann is survived by his wife Eva, daughter Wendy, son Thomas, brother Frank and grandchild Noah.
Special to The Globe and Mail