Travel in time
Just kilometres away from smoggy Johannesburg are the ancient dolomite hills and vAlleys thAt first gAve off oxygen, mAking life on EArth possible.
When I entered the balcony restaurant at the Cradle of Humankind last year and was greeted by savanna grassland and thickets rolling out to the Magaliesberg range on the horizon, I realised I’d been there before.
My sister, nephew and I had taken our mother there for her eighty-somethingth birthday, about 10 years ago. The restaurant was called Cornute and, while the meal was forgettable, we were there for the view, the sense of place and occasion, as much as the food.
She had always loved those Highveld hills. I recalled that Howard Geach, a geologist who was one of the team that started &Beyond lodges (then Conservation Corporation Africa), had invited me to see his office.
Geach is now a fellow private tour guide, a colleague in conservation, specialising in showing tourists around the geology, wildlife and hominid discoveries in the Cradle Nature Reserve in the Cradle of Humankind.
This is where the bookings he takes, via email at home in suburban Johannesburg some 45 minutes away, assume life.
After meeting his guests for a morning drive at the reserve’s boutique hotel, with coffee and croissants consumed, he sets out into the hills in a hotel game-drive vehicle, sharing the story of humankind’s origins.
By all palaeontological and geological accounts, there was relatively significant life there in early pre-history, the details of which provide Geach with ample ingredients for his storytelling tours.
These are the hills and valleys where Professor Lee Berger conducted his studies as the research professor in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science at Wits University.
It was on a field trip in 2008, at a site called Malapa, when Berger’s nine-year-old son Matthew found a rock containing a fossilized hominid bone. Being his father’s son, Matthew
would’ve known that it was a bone but, as Geach explains, there was no more qualified person than Berger to identify it as a human shoulder girdle. Not only had Berger studied the bone structure of hominids under the globally acclaimed paleoanthropologist Professor Phillip Tobias, but his doctoral studies had focused on the shoulder girdle of early hominins.
This discovery of Australopithecus sediba was a very significant find and it gave the Kansas-born and Georgia-raised naturalised South African professor a critical boost in support of his requests for increased funding to back his research.
The young male Australopithecus sediba, which Berger posited replaced the famous east African “Lucy” as the most likely immediate ancestor of our own genus, Homo, put the cat among the paleo pigeons, and had paleoanthropologists around the world twittering their concerns about teeth and bones.
An older girl was found alongside the young male. Known as MH1 (Malapa Hominid 1) and MH2, the pair are on display in the small museum that Berger, in collaboration with Wits University, recently opened at the Cradle Boutique Hotel.
Today, the collapsed cave at Malapa is characterised by bits of string draped across a yawning pit of rock and earth, underneath an award-winning architectural viewing platform, the construction and erection of which is worth a lunch in itself.
In the pit, Berger’s team believe, are fossilized teeth and bones in the rocks beneath a sabre-toothed cat.
While pointing them out to a group of us with his intermittently working laser-pointer, Geach says Malapa is the second-most important hominid site in Africa, after Berger’s other significant dig, the Rising Star cave complex, which lies over a couple of hills and around the proverbial Highveld corner.
Many Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi, fleeing from a sabre-toothed tiger, will have fallen into such pits, with their remains preserved, for future palaeontologists to stumble over
In 2015, Rising Star revealed 2,000 fossil fragments that make up 21 male and female Homo naledi adults and infants. They are anywhere between 236,000 and 335,000 years old, and display a unique combination of human and non-human traits throughout their skeletons.
Rising Star was the richest fossil hominid site on the planet, Berger told me in an interview last year – the importance of which I didn’t initially comprehend, confounded by all the talk of “billions” and “millions” and rocks and fossils tumbling between the evolution of both humankind and Earth.
We were sitting in the same restaurant, at roughly the same table, that we’d sat with my mother a decade previously.
Death traps and bone collectors
The numbers involved in deep palaeontology discoveries are mind-boggling. My mother wasn’t great with numbers, a bit like my stunned comprehension of standing with both feet on rocks, near the entrance to the hotel, that are separated by 500 million years.
But what caught my breath was Berger’s news about these distant ancestors, discovered in caves just a few kilometres apart. He told me, repeating a 2017 television interview, that Homo naledi was walking these hills at about the same time as Homo sapiens.
Assisted by his significant geological nous,
Geach has learnt in his five years guiding tourists around the discoveries of Berger at Malapa and Professor Robert Broom in Gladysvale, that the calcite found in the dolomitic limestone formations makes for the perfect preservation of hominid bones.
Not just in the caves and subterranean chambers, but in the sinkholes too.
“Death traps and bone collectors,” Geach calls them, as we stand around one of many such depressions to be found on those hills, with the Johannesburg skyline far in the distance. Many Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi, fleeing from a sabre-toothed tiger, maybe like the teenage MH1, will have fallen into such pits, with their remains preserved, buried in the breccia (Italian for “concrete”) for future palaeontologists to stumble over while hunting the hills of the Cradle.
To my layman’s mind, this explains why, outside the entrance to Gladysvale, where Geach says about 200,000 mostly fauna fossils were found (only six hominid bones among them), so many are to be found in the breccia.
Apparently, the miners working the lime kilns during the Anglo-Boer war, before this pre-history was known, were proficient with dynamite while the palaeontology students working the caves had interest only in hominid bones, tossing rocks housing anything else over their shoulders.
This makes Gladysvale quite perfect for young, appropriately curious minds. Like the wing of the barn owl near the cave entrance in the process of being fossilized, the experience is little short of mind-boggling, as one guest described it (although in not quite such courteous a term).
Illustrations back at Berger’s small museum make the experience more digestible, which is why it is recommended to pass through it before diving deep into Geach’s world.
They reveal, with displays and diagrams, how Berger’s team imagined the Cradle landscape would have changed, together with the wildlife, evolving ever so slightly over millennia.
Those hills today are roamed by herds of blesbok, eland, red hartebeest and blue wildebeest, with the occasional giraffe down in the valleys and black-breasted snake eagle gliding along near rocky horizons. Jackal are loud and numerous at night, and two meerkat dens have been identified.
Battlefield guide and author Rob Milne says that among the battles, wildlife and breccia, more battles were fought in those hills than in KwaZulu-Natal, where the battlefields of Isandlwana and Spioenkop are found.
For the nature enthusiast, it is easy to get excited about wildlife so close to Johannesburg, the proverbial big and sprawling smoke. As it is for those who pursue trees and plants.
Geach’s excitement at coming across a ninth and tenth colony of a rare and endemic Highveld grassland orchid, which we found on a koppie while hiking en route to lunch on a koppie, was clear.
Yet nothing is separate; these aren’t “silos”. People, creatures, water, insects, soil, plants and the air we breathe are all connected.
This thinking helps me digest the Cradle experience: the billion-year-old rocks and plants as a starter, the hominids as main course, and wildlife, termites and birds as dessert, with the universe as the table. Big-picture stuff.
Which is pretty much how I felt a few years ago on my first excursion out into those Highveld hills (a few years after Mom’s birthday lunch).
I was standing on a mound of ruddy-looking rocks from the ancient Rooihoogte Formation, with Krugersdorp, suburban Randburg and the Sandton and city skylines fringing the hazy afternoon horizon, when the geologist in Geach explained that it was these dolomite rocks that first gave off oxygen, making life on Earth possible.
“You mean these rocks?” I asked, pointing beneath my boots.
“Yes,” he said.