HANDS THAT ROCKED THE CRADLE

IT’S LIKE a football pitch of fossils – that is how rich the world’s longest-running archaeological site, the Cradle of Humankind, is – and it has researchers risking their lives to make life-changing finds.

The Cradle of Humankind in Sterkfontein – 50km north-west of Joburg – has been dug for over 80 years.

For several famous archaeologists and palaeontologists, the caves were a gift that kept on giving as early as the 1930s, but for Wits diver Pieter Verhulsel, they became a curse that took his life in 1984.

Robert Broom – the famous palaeontologist – began working in the Cradle caves in his seventies and discovered some of the most important fossils in South Africa in terms of mammal-like reptiles – the things that showed that the continents were interconnected.

He got interested in the idea that maybe there were other caves that also had hominins in them, so he began working at caves surrounding Sterkfontein such as Swartkrans and Kromdraai. In Sterkfontein, he found a series of fossils, including

Plesianthropus transvaalensis, or Mrs Ples, a 2.1 million-yearold Australopithecus skull that showed that Raymond Dart’s discovery of the Taung Child in North West in 1924 was only the tip of the iceberg.

The late Phillip V Tobias, a professor emeritus at Wits, and Professor Ronald Clarke found Little Foot, an almost complete Australopithecus skeleton more than 3 million years old, in 1997.

The caves have also produced some of the earliest evidence of stone tool use, with researchers unearthing 2 million-year-old stone tools. Excavations continue at the caves.