An eye-opening origin safari
A trip to the Greater Cradle Nature Reserve in the Cradle of Humankind reveals the precariousness of our
Thirty minutes from Pretoria and Johannesburg is a living, breathing natural history museum of our origin story as a planet and as a species. We meet our guide, Paul Zille, on the veranda of the ecofriendly Cradle Boutique Hotel for coffee, enthralled by the spectacular vista of sweeping savannah and dolomite grasslands.
Paul drives my two teenage sons, my partner and me on a refreshing rough-andtumble meandering trip on the back of an open-top game-drive vehicle through parts of the 9,000ha privately owned Greater Cradle Nature Reserve.
Located in the heart of the Unesco Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, the reserve offers paleontological tours to two major live fossil exploration sites, as well as game drives and bush walks.
En route to our first stop, we encounter a nursery herd of inquisitive impala, warthogs, vervet monkeys and blesbok.
I am amazed at these calm, serendipitous sightings in these wild bushveld and savannah biomes so close to the high-rise, heaving human mess of Joburg on the distant horizon.
Paul stops at a viewpoint that allows us to take in the rocky landscape where the gold-laden reefs birthed the mining metropolis of Joburg in the late 1800s, attracting fortune-seekers and chancers from across the globe and forever changing the course of South African history.
With the Joburg skyline in front of us and the Magaliesberg to the right of us, Paul narrates the story of our planetary evolution from swirling stardust orbiting the violent, hot young sun – how this dust and gas melded into clumps of rock by the forces of drag and then, after being bombarded by meteors and water-bearing asteroids, Earth grew into its final size through a massive collision with a Mars-sized object.
This was about 4.5 billion years ago, and the “moon-forming” impact was so violent that it vaporised some of the rock and metal from both the early Earth and the meteorite, forming a disc around the Earth that eventually became our moon.
This piece of rock at the highest point on the tour, Paul points out to us, is located in the middle of the Kaapvaal Craton, which, approximately three billion years ago, was the first portion of the Earth’s crust to emerge from the sea that then covered the globe.
Long before the Himalayas, our ancient land emerged to host the first forms of life about 3.7 billion years ago, when early microbes evolved into an organism called cyanobacteria, which used water, sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce food.
Yes, the first photosynthesis – the process in plants to which we owe every one of our oxygen-inhaling lives. An oxygen-rich atmosphere created over billions of years that we humans, in just a few centuries, are rapidly polluting with our fossil fuels.
While we were being enraptured by Paul’s narrative of the very beginning of Earth and the moon, and how the delicate balance of the Goldilocks Zone led to the perfect conditions for life to flourish, my 13-year-old son interrupted us with an excited shriek.
“Look, a giraffe!”
I couldn’t see what he saw ambling towards us from such a distance and paid no heed, but there it was – a beautiful, languid specimen taking a morning stroll past a cluster of five curious bipedal primates.
The giraffe led to a debate about evolution and why the giraffe developed its long neck to distinguish itself from the rest of its antelope family. The ability to forage for food in high treetops was one theory. Another theory by a researcher in the 1990s, I later discovered, is a “necks for sex” hypothesis – that male giraffes developed necks to bash each other in competition for females.