This is South Africa by Peter Borchert

Author:Peter Borchert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775845164
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2018-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

The caves at Sterkfontein (1) are the centrepiece of some 15 fossil sites that fall within the Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage Site near Johannesburg.

The caves, consisting of several large chambers, were first discovered by lime prospectors in 1896, but it was not until 1935, when some monkey fossils were unearthed there, that Sterkfontein’s value as a rich repository of fossil material became evident.

It is also at these caves that the ‘grandmother’ of all humankind was excavated in 1947. She was Mrs Ples, a well-preserved skull said to be 2.3 million years old. She was followed 47 years later by Little Foot, simply a few human-like bones found in a bag of fossils that had previously been excavated at Sterkfontein. After a further 23 years of painstaking excavation work, an almost complete skeleton of this early human ancestor was shown to the public in 2017. Estimated to have lived 3.67 million years ago, Little Foot is considerably older than Mrs Ples.

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