Red deserts of the Wild Coast

Along the Wild Coast there are six “red deserts” – small patches of bare red earth that have been exposed by erosion. Over the past two years, a team of archaeologists led by Professor Erich Fisher has excavated some of these red deserts and found evidence of Stone Age tools – axes, arrowheads and scrapers that date back between 300 000 and 500 000 years.

‘If you go to these deserts you will find tools that are very big for our hands,’ says Sinegugu Zukulu, an environmental activist who was raised on the Wild Coast, and who has been a mentor to so many of the region’s senior guides. ‘These would have been used by Homo erectus – the species before Homo sapiens – because their hands were much bigger than ours.’ Also discovered in these deserts were traces of medicinal plants that were used, as well as bones of animals that lived in the Drakensberg. ‘This shows that people used to live between the Drakensberg and Pondoland,’ explains Zukulu. ‘These red deserts are exceptionally rich heritage sites and they should not be disturbed but ironically, because these sites have a high concentration of minerals, the government wants to mine them.’