South Africa: Walking With Ancestors: Cradle of Humankind

Digging Up Our Ancestors: A Morning at the Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng, South Africa

Right then. Today’s outing was to go and stare at some very old rocks and, with any luck, some very old bones as well. The Cradle of Humankind, they call it, which is one of those names that sounds like it was invented by a marketing committee but turns out to be entirely justified. It’s a sprawling complex of some 300 limestone caves about 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg, and it happens to be one of the most important archaeological and anthropological sites on the entire planet. Not bad for a patch of grassland that, from the car window, looks like it wouldn’t trouble a walking holiday in the Yorkshire Dales.

I should say straight away that I went into this trip with the vague, half-remembered notion that “Cradle of Humankind” was one of those grand names places give themselves in the hope nobody checks the small print — a bit like every English seaside town claiming to be “the jewel of the coast.” This one, unusually, deserves it. UNESCO agreed back in 1999, which is when the whole site was declared a World Heritage Site, and the fossil record that’s come out of the ground here is genuinely staggering — human and animal remains going back more than two million years, including a hominin skull that’s very nearly complete. When I say hominin, incidentally, I mean the wider family that includes us, modern humans, along with our more knuckle-dragging (that’s probably unfair, but I’m going with it) direct ancestors.

🦴 More Relatives Than I Was Expecting

At the Sterkfontein Caves alone — just one part of this enormous site — the remains of more than 500 individual hominins have been dug out of the limestone over the years. Five hundred. I struggled to name five hundred of my own actual living relatives, and here’s a cave that’s been quietly hoarding the ancestors of the entire human race since before anyone thought to look. This is no small part of why the area got its UNESCO status in 1999, and it’s also been central to proving what’s known as the “Out of Africa” theory — the idea, now about as close to settled scientific fact as these things get, that humans and our ancestors evolved here in Africa and then gradually spread out to populate the rest of the world.

The serious digging started in the 1930s and ’40s, when a Scottish-born palaeontologist called Robert Broom, working with a very determined sense of purpose and, from the photographs, an even more determined moustache, began pulling early hominin fossils out of the Sterkfontein caves. In 1947 he and his team found a remarkably complete Australopithecus africanus skull that the newspapers of the day nicknamed “Mrs Ples” — though modern analysis suggests “Mrs” might not have been strictly accurate, and the poor thing may well have been a young male. Nobody’s rushing to change the name at this point; it’s stuck, the way nicknames tend to.

Then, decades later, in 1994, a palaeontologist named Ron Clarke started finding foot bones in a box of unsorted fossils that had been sitting in a drawer since the 1980s, misfiled among a heap of animal remains — which felt to me like the most British possible way for a landmark discovery to happen, by someone finally getting around to a bit of admin. That led him back into Sterkfontein itself, where over the following years his team painstakingly excavated what’s now called “Little Foot,” a nearly complete Australopithecus skeleton dated at something like 3.67 million years old. It took the best part of two decades to fully extract the thing from the surrounding rock, which does put my own tendency to leave DIY jobs unfinished for six months into some sort of perspective. And more recently still, in 2013, a team led by Lee Berger found an entirely new species in a different chamber of the same broader cave system — Homo naledi, squeezed into a passage so tight that only very slim, very brave cavers could get in to retrieve the bones. I did wonder, reading about it later, whether I myself would fit through that passage. I decided not to test the theory.

🏛️ The Museum That Saves You From Standing About in a Field

Now, here’s a thing worth saying plainly: turning up at an actual archaeological dig site, on your own, with no context and no explanation, is about as interesting as watching paint dry — unless, of course, you happen to be an archaeologist yourself, in which case I imagine it’s the best day out going. For the rest of us, thank heavens somebody had the sense to build a proper museum. It’s at a place called Maropeng, close to where the most significant of the discoveries were actually made, and it does the very sensible job of taking two million years of extremely complicated science and turning it into something a bloke from London with no scientific training whatsoever can actually follow. Maropeng, I learned, means something like “returning to the place of origin” in Setswana, which is a rather lovely name for a building, and considerably better than anything we’d have called it back home — “The Heritage Experience,” probably, with a car park round the back and a Costa Coffee.

We got ourselves organised and decided to start the day at the Maropeng Visitor Centre rather than heading straight for the caves, which in hindsight was exactly the right call. It meant we had some idea what we were looking at once we did get underground, rather than just nodding along at a hole in the rock and pretending to be impressed.

🚌 Beating the School Trip

I’m rather proud of this next bit, because it’s not often that I, a man not naturally inclined to get up early on holiday, manage to out-plan an entire fleet of coaches full of schoolchildren. We got ourselves there nice and early, well ahead of the daily invasion of buses that apparently descends on the place with depressing regularity — every day, we were told, coachloads of schoolkids arrive to be marched round the exhibits, which I’m sure is educationally marvellous for them but isn’t much fun for a grown adult trying to read a placard about early hominin dentition in peace. Getting there first also meant we bagged a parking spot in the shade, which doesn’t sound like much of a triumph until you’ve stood in the South African sun waiting for a car to become touchable again. Small victories, and all that.

Unsurprisingly, given the hour, the visitor centre itself was very quiet when we arrived — just us, echoing footsteps, and the faint sense of having got one over on several hundred eleven-year-olds who were, at that moment, presumably still on a bus somewhere on the R563 arguing about whose turn it was to sit at the window.

The landscape out there, incidentally, is not what I’d pictured when someone says “important archaeological site in Africa.” No towering cliffs, no dramatic gorges — just rolling grassland, the odd rocky outcrop poking up out of the veld, and river courses cutting quietly through it all, which is apparently very much what this whole stretch of land looked like long before Johannesburg’s urban sprawl came along and started gobbling up the horizon. It’s an oddly gentle, undramatic setting for something so consequential. Rather like discovering the King James Bible was drafted in a garden shed in Neasden.