Smoke clears on Stone Age find

● The Knysna fires were the worst in the town’s history, but they also revealed just how old that history is by exposing an early Stone Age “tool workshop” on the western headland flanking the Knysna lagoon.

The site had been lost for years beneath thick vegetation in the Featherbed private nature reserve that provides the town’s world famous pristine backdrop – a wall of rock and undulating green.

When everything was laid bare by the flames, the site was back, untroubled by the latest inferno.

It was a welcome surprise for horticulturalist Martin Hatchuel, who first worked in the reserve 30 years ago and now manages its post-fire rehabilitation.

“I’d been told that there was an early Stone Age tool workshop on the reserve, but although I often looked, I never could find it in those early years,” Hatchuel said in a newsletter circulated this week.

“Well, on my first post-fires walk up the firebreak, there it was — exposed now that the vegetation had been burned away. I didn’t touch any of it, though; I simply marked the place, and sent the pin and some of the pics to an archaeologist who is working in the area.”

It wasn’t the only happy discovery at the reserve.

Hatchuel also stumbled across a bench, miraculously unscathed, which he had helped carry down to the edge of the reserve looking onto the Knysna heads.

“Of course I sat there for a while,” said Hatchuel.