Cradle of Humankind

Minnaar’s Cave is located close to Sterkfontein in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa.However, the exact location
of this important Plio-Pleistocene site has been uncertain for more than 60 years. The site has yielded important
fossils.We propose a location for the site and provide a preliminary description of the animal remains recovered from
recent research. In addition, a summary of the fossils already described from Minnaar’s Cave is provided.

The valley of the Blauawbankspruit River, classified by the UNESCO since 1998, is considered as the cradle of the humankind. It yielded about one third of the remains of earliest hominids (the man’s ancestor) known yet for all African continent (about one thousand). These fossils spread on a length of
3 million years (between -4 and -1 million years), the period which includes the appearance of the Homo genus (the first men).
Karstic morphologies are very rare in this valley, but the endokarst is highly developed. The Sterkfontein cave system constitutes a real labyrinth with more than 10 km of galleries. The fossils are preserved in breccias initially formed in underground rooms as in Silberberg Grotto (Sterkfontein) for example. But a lot of breccias can also be seen outside and correspond to old caves partially cut by the erosion.
The aim of our research program is to understand the geomorphological evolution of this valley and its cave system in order to describe the paleo-landscapes of the hominids and also to specify the taphonomy of the fossils. During the next mis ions, we will pursue the geomorphological cartography initiated this year but also the survey of the breccias and the underground fillings. To illustrate this approach, we will start a 3D cartography of the valley of the Blauawbankspruit associated with a detailed map of the caves of the area. The main rooms will be mapped in high resolution with a 3D laser scan.

Excavations during November 2013 in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa, yielded more than 1550 specimens of a new hominin, Homo naledi. Four bird bones were collected from the surface of the Dinaledi Chamber during the first phase of the initial excavations. Although mentioned in the initial geological and taphonomic reports, the bird remains have not been formally identified and described until now. Here we identify these remains as the extant barn owl (Tyto alba) which is today common in the region and which is considered to have been an important agent of accumulation of microfaunal remains at many local Plio-Pleistocene sites in the Cradle of Humankind. Based on the greatest length measurement and breadth of the proximal articulation of the tarsometatarsus specimen, it is suggested that a single (female) individual is represented, despite the small sample sizes available for comparison. Although it is unclear how the remains of this female owl came to be accumulated in the remote Dinaledi Chamber, we suggest several possible taphonomic scenarios and hypothesise that these remains are not directly associated with the Homo naledi remains. Significance: • Owl bones from the Dinaledi Chamber are the only other macro-vertebrate remains from this Chamber. • The other remains discovered are that of more than 15 individuals of the enigmatic Homo naledi. • The remains of the Dinaledi Chamber owl further our understanding of the contents of the important material contained within the Dinaledi system as they are the only more recent fossils to be recovered from this area of the Rising Star Cave system and are therefore important in and of themselves as an indicator that more proximal parts of the Rising Star Cave system have been suitable for use by barn owls at greater time depths than the present.

Many antelopes have an excellent sense of smell, and our human relatives such as Paranthropus robustus may have associate themselves with those antelope species during the day to avoid predation by lions, leopards and carnivores. This helps to explain why robust australopithecines successfully survived for nearly a million years on the Highveld of South Africa.

Quella che Damiano Marchi – paleoantropologo dell’università di Pisa – ricostruisce ne Il mistero di Homo naledi (Mondadori, 2016) è davvero la storia di una scoperta straordinaria, una scoperta destinata a cambiare profondamente il modo di pensare all’evoluzione umana.

In this article, I address a controversy about species meanings and a racialising discourse of animality surrounding the Homo naledi fossils that were discovered in 2013 at the Cradle of Humankind; a fossil-rich area located just outside of Johannesburg. Nothing less than the origins, and definition, of humanity were said to be at stake in the fossils. This claim issued from the co-presence within the specimens of so-called "human" and "animal" features. In South Africa, the fossils provoked what Claire Jean Kim (2015) would call an 'impassioned dispute' about the perceived relationships between animals-particularly primates-and persons who are socially marked, and who identify, as black. Situating the naledi event within the long history of the 'interconstitution' (Kim 2015) of blackness and animality, I argue that the controversy surfaced anxieties about the untethering of racialising species meanings from prevailing ideas about the ontological foundations of "the human". By approaching the cultural politics of the dispute, I explore how it provided an opening onto the conjugation of race and species within South Africa and conclude that the naledi event attests to the perils of eliding the history of race science as well as the difficulty of retaining within anti-racist politics "the animal" as a device to secure "the human".

Little Foot, un Australopithecus prometheus, serait  un quasi contemporain d’un fossile bien moins complet, Lucy, le célèbre Australopithecus afarensis découvert en 1974 en Ethiopie.
Repéré dans des circonstances exceptionnelles, cet australopithèque est le plus complet jamais mis au jour, et constitue un élément unique dans la connaissance des origines de l’Humanité.
Si son âge, compris entre 2 et 4 millions d’années, pose toujours question, une équipe de chercheurs français, en collaboration avec l’Université du Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), apporte aujourd’hui d’importants éléments sur sa datation.
Depuis sa découverte, les avis ont divergé à propos de l’ancienneté de Little Foot.. Daterait-il de 3,3 millions d’années, comme l’envisagent Ron Clarke et Tim Partridge à partir de la morphologie de l’hominidé et d’une première datation paléomagnétique ? En 2007, à la demande de l’université sud-africaine, Laurent Bruxelles, géomorphologue à l’Inrap, prend en charge ce délicat problème de chronologie et démêle la succession des strates qui enserrent le squelette. Entre sa fossilisation et l’arrivée des sédiments qui ont été datés, plusieurs étapes géologiques ont été distinguées, chacune d’entre elles impliquant des phénomènes lents, requérant le long terme.
Avant son extraction, une équipe française a réalisé dans la grotte, en janvier 2010, un modèle en trois dimensions du fossile. Laurent Bruxelles et José Braga (paléoanthropologue, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse), accompagnés d’une équipe d’informaticiens et de spécialistes du scanner 3D

Avec Laurent Bruxelles, géomorphologue à l’Inrap et José Braga, paléoanthropologue à Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse

The Lincoln-Fault cave system lies adjacent to the Sterkfontein Cave system in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, Gauteng Province, South Africa. Lincoln Cave contains a mid- to late Pleistocene fossiliferous deposit which has been dated using uranium series methods to between 252,600  35,600 and 115,300  7,700 years old. Although speleologists presumed that there was no connection between the Lincoln Cave and Sterkfontein Cave systems, results of excavations conducted in 1997 suggest a link between the deposits. Detailed comparisons of artifacts, fauna, hominid material, and a statistical correspondence analysis (CA) of the macromammalian fauna in the deposits strongly support this hypothesis. The recovery of Early Acheulean-type artifacts from the Lincoln Cave suggests that older artifacts eroded out of Sterkfontein Member 5 West and were redeposited into the younger Lincoln Cave deposits. The close physical proximity of these deposits, and the nature of the material recovered from them, indicates that the material was probably redeposited via a link between the two cave systems. Although faunal mixing is present, it is possible to say that large carnivorans become more scarce at Sterkfontein during the mid- to late Pleistocene, while small canids and felids appear to become more abundant, indicating that large and small carnivorans probably varied their use of the site through time. This may also reflect an increasing presence of humans in the Sterkfontein area during the mid- to late Pleistocene.

The Lincoln-Fault cave system lies adjacent to the Sterkfontein Cave system in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, Gauteng Province, South Africa. Lincoln Cave contains a mid- to late Pleistocene fossiliferous deposit which has been dated using uranium series methods to between 252,600  35,600 and 115,300  7,700 years old. Although speleologists presumed that there was no connection between the Lincoln Cave and Sterkfontein Cave systems, results of excavations conducted in 1997 suggest a link between the deposits. Detailed comparisons of artifacts, fauna, hominid material, and a statistical correspondence analysis (CA) of the macromammalian fauna in the deposits strongly support this hypothesis. The recovery of Early Acheulean-type artifacts from the Lincoln Cave suggests that older artifacts eroded out of Sterkfontein Member 5 West and were redeposited into the younger Lincoln Cave deposits. The close physical proximity of these deposits, and the nature of the material r...

The Cradle of Humankind is known for sites such as Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Drimolen and Kromdraai, among others, that offer a detailed understanding of the Plio-Pleistocene. However, the 'Tswana' stone-walled structures that are found in this landscape have seen comparatively less research. We present preliminary results from an ongoing mapping and research programme on the farm Project 58 where a multi-component settlement is located. The site is composed of several distinct areas, a partially crenated boundary wall design, kraals located inside and outside the settlement, and internal housing and grain bin structures. Based on the architecture of the stone-walled structure, the site was most likely occupied between AD 1450 and 1700 and appears similar to Taylor's (1979) Group I sites. Studying the more recent past of this region reclaims a history that has been disarticulated from the landscape.

Cooper’s D is a fossil locality in the Bloubank Valley close to other important sites such as Sterkfontein and Kromdraai in Gauteng, South Africa. The fossil deposits of Cooper’s D date to 1.38 ± 0.11 Ma. Hominins like Paranthropus robustus and early Homo have been recovered from Cooper’s Cave. We report here on the Equidae remains. Our sample contains specimens from the extinct Equus capensis, and a specimen which represents an extinct hipparion Eurygnathohippus cf. cornelianus. This particular specimen was previously identified as plains zebra (Equus quagga). The contribution of Equidae to the total fossil assemblage of Cooper’s D is relatively low, and these remains were likely accumulated by various predators such as spotted and brown hyenas and leopards. The Equidae, as well as the other fauna from Cooper’s D supports the existence of grassland, wooded and water components in the vicinity of the site.

This paper presents the results of a recent three-dimensional (3D) survey at the Drimolen Makondo palaeontological deposits in the Hominid Sites of South Africa UNESCO World Heritage site. The Drimolen Makondo is a palaeokarstic feature that consists of a heavily eroded 2.6-2.0 Ma fossil-bearing palaeocave remnant. With photogrammetry and a laser scan survey, two 3D site models were created, georectified, and imported into geographical information system software. This paper outlines both of these survey techniques and provides an assessment of the relevant merits of each method and their applicability for detailed recording and archival documentation of palaeokarstic palaeontological and archaeological sites. Given the complex depositional context of many of the fossil-bearing South African cave systems and their importance for understanding our evolutionary history, new methods are critical to visualising and analysing 3D spatial data. The utility of 3D models lies in their ability to integrate with total station survey techniques to accurately record and control excavations and provide a means of visualising stratigraphic, sedimentary, and spatial contexts in various geographical information system platforms. The use of low-cost and time-efficient digital photographic surveys to create accurate 3D models, if completed accurately, can provide researchers with a means of contextualising excavation data without the need for expensive and highly specialised equipment. The development of this method combined with differential global positioning systems provides a solution in more remote locations to recording highly accurate fossil and 3D site contexts with increasing ease. It also allows the sites to be recorded as part of an evolving landscape rather than as single isolated localities. This technique should be a standard technique implemented when working on irreplaceable UNESCO World Heritage sites such as the hominin-bearing caves of South Africa.