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Lost Secrets - an adventure during Neolithic times

Prehistoric Cumbria

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<< Other Photo Pages >> Sterkfontein - Cave or Rock Shelter in South Africa

Submitted by bat400 on Friday, 01 July 2022  Page Views: 7634

Mesolithic, Palaeolithic and EarlierSite Name: Sterkfontein
Country: South Africa
NOTE: This site is 89.448 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Krugersdorp
Latitude: 26.015656S  Longitude: 27.734294E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
5 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
5 Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
4 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
4

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External Links:

Sterkfontein
Sterkfontein submitted by Creative Commons : Sterkfontein Caves Creative Commons photo by Flowcomm (Vote or comment on this photo)
Caves in South Africa.
Numerous early hominin remains have been found at the site over the last few decades. These have been attributed to Australopithecus, early Homo and Paranthropus. The site is open to the public and an on site museum interprets the finds and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Sterkfontein Caves and Maropeng Visitor Center Official Website.

Hobbyist turned archaeologist studies unbroken sweep of prehistoric time in South Africa. See comment below for details

Note: Early human ancestors one million years older than earlier thought, more in the comments on our page
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Sterkfontein
Sterkfontein submitted by Creative Commons : Early life display, Sterkfontein Caves Visitor Centre Creative Commons photo by Flowcomm (Vote or comment on this photo)

Sterkfontein
Sterkfontein submitted by Creative Commons : Evolution display in the Cradle of Humankind museum Creative Commons photo by Meraj Chhaya (Vote or comment on this photo)

Sterkfontein
Sterkfontein submitted by Creative Commons : Sterkfontein Caves, Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng, South Africa Creative Commons photo by Flowcomm (Vote or comment on this photo)

Sterkfontein
Sterkfontein submitted by Creative Commons : Stone tool sites in Africa - map Creative Commons photo by Flowcomm (Vote or comment on this photo)

Sterkfontein
Sterkfontein submitted by Creative Commons : Embedded Human Fossil - Sterkfontein Caves - The Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site The two white 'donut' circles on each side of the hand (shadow) are end on (cross section) views of fossilized femurs of a primitive australopithecine. Further excavation could bring down the cave. The guide, Lindiwe, provided an excellent underground tour of excavations of 2.3 million year old hum...

Sterkfontein
Sterkfontein submitted by Creative Commons : Museum at Sterkfontein, "the Cradle of Humankind" Creative Commons photo by Meraj Chhaya

Sterkfontein
Sterkfontein submitted by Creative Commons : Sterkfontein Caves, Maropeng, Gauteng, South Africa Creative Commons photo by South African Tourism

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 18.4km NE 35° Malapa* Cave or Rock Shelter
 53.7km ENE 57° African Window* Museum
 219.0km SW 233° Wolmaransstad Rock Art Rock Art
 248.0km NW 318° Matsieng Footprints Rock Art
 250.7km NNE 12° Palala River Bluffs San Rock Paintings* Rock Art
 305.8km E 83° Bantu stone circles* Standing Stones
 328.0km SW 230° Stowlands Rock art Rock Art
 329.7km E 94° Lion Cavern Ngwenya Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 420.3km SSE 154° Kamberg rock art Rock Art
 421.3km SW 223° McGregor Museum Museum
 421.8km SW 226° Nooitgedacht Rock art Rock Art
 423.9km SW 225° Wildebeestkuil* Rock Art
 425.0km S 173° Lesob 5 Rock Art
 425.6km S 173° Lesob 4 Rock Art
 425.9km S 173° Lesob 2 Rock Art
 426.0km S 173° Lesob 3 Rock Art
 426.5km S 174° Lesob 1 Rock Art
 436.0km SSE 157° Ikanti Shelter I Rock Art
 437.7km ESE 106° Border Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 447.3km NNE 21° Machete I Rock Art
 461.6km WSW 243° Wonderwerk Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
 474.2km SW 226° Driekopseiland Rock Art Rock Art
 501.0km WSW 247° Kathu Pan* Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 506.0km SW 221° Thomas' Farm Belmont Rock Art Rock Art
 510.6km SE 141° Sibudu Cave* Cave or Rock Shelter
View more nearby sites and additional images

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"Sterkfontein" | Login/Create an Account | 3 News and Comments
  
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Re: Sterkfontein by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 29 June 2022
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Street view:

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Early human ancestors one million years older than earlier thought by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 29 June 2022
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Fossils from South African cave are 3.4 to 3.6m years old and walked the Earth at same time as east African relatives.

The fossils of our earliest ancestors found in South Africa are a million years older than previously thought, meaning they walked the Earth around the same time as their east African relatives like the famous “Lucy”, according to new research.

The Sterkfontein caves at the Cradle of Humankind world heritage site northwest of Johannesburg have yielded more Australopithecus fossils than any other site in the world.Among them was “Mrs Ples”, the most complete skull of an Australopithecus africanus found in South Africa in 1947.

Based on previous measurements, Mrs Ples and other fossils found at a similar depth of the cave were estimated to be between 2.1 and 2.6m years old. But “chronologically that didn’t fit,” said French scientist Laurent Bruxelles, one of the authors of a study published Monday in the PNAS science journal.

Source: The Guardian.

Original paper: Cosmogenic nuclide dating of Australopithecus at Sterkfontein, South Africa.
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Sifting through S. Africa's archaeological riches by bat400 on Tuesday, 09 November 2010
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Submitted by coldrum ---

When Morris Sutton picks a chipped, ordinary-looking rock from the soil, he's the first to touch the stone tool since an ancestor of man used it nearly 2 million years ago.

In his dim, cool cavern at the bottom of a 30-foot ladder, he feels the wonder of it, peering through a window deep into time.

Sutton, 47, an archaeologist, was a Memphis, Tenn., factory manager who grew tired of the flat horizon of commerce and manufacturing. So he quit to pursue his hobby: hunting for fossils and Stone Age tools. He went back to college to study archaeology and later moved to South Africa, where he is a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute for Human Evolution at Witwatersrand University.

South Africa is a mecca for archaeologists from around the world; its fossils cover an unbroken sweep of prehistoric time, from the first smudge of life through the dinosaur era to early hominids and beyond. Some of the world's most significant fossils were discovered here: the Taung child, Little Foot and, in April, a young male hominid, believed to be a new species, Australopithecus sediba, whose remains appear to be nearly 2 million years old.

The soft-spoken Sutton doesn't fit the stereotype of an Indiana Jones-style wunderkind, desperate to unearth the oldest human ancestor. He calibrates his assertions cautiously as he clambers over a rough, dry landscape pocked with caves.

He's excavating at Swartkrans in the Sterkfontein Valley, pulling out specimens more than a million years old. He's the kind of man who gets excited about an almost imperceptible layering of different-colored soils - deposits from different millenniums. Yet he could dig here for years without finding that once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough - a missing link, a new species, evidence of early cooking. The hole might yield nothing new.

"Well," he pauses hesitantly. "You don't have to discover anything new. You can look at things from a different angle, bring a new perspective."

It's now possible, for example, to analyze the microscopic residue of meat or plants left on stone tools nearly 2 million years old and learn what the tools were used for.

More than a third of the world's hominid fossils were found in one small area at Sterkfontein. The stone tools here are from the era when humankind's predecessors and related primates were evolving, a million years ago and more. Homo ergaster is one such predecessor, whereas Australopethicus robustus was a chunky, large-jawed branch on the same family tree that died out.

In past decades, scientists at Swartkrans turned up evidence of some of the earliest controlled use of fire, as much as 1.5 million years ago. They found evidence that robustus coexisted with early humans.

Sutton gestures with quiet pride at an excavated area not much bigger than a double bed: That's five years' digging there. He and his South African assistant, Andrew Phaswana, 35, scrape away the soil, unearthing as many riddles as answers.

Phaswana sits in the sunshine, using tweezers to sort through a chunky pile that looks like breakfast cereal. It's run-of-the-mill stuff: thousands of bones and teeth of tiny mouse-like rodents and chips of stone that went flying as the ancients fashioned their tools. He classifies them and bags them up.

Like Sutton, Phaswana once had an unsatisfying job, as a gas station attendant. He loves the thrill of finding huge, flat robustus molars, probably used for grinding fibrous vegetation such as roots.

"I like this job because I learn more every day. I learn where I come from and how the old people were behaving and how they were eating and how they used fire," Phaswana said. In the study of mankind's ancestors and related species, blind alleys, contested theories and revisions are the norm. Sutton is cautious about jumping to conclusions.

The fossils of burned bones found at Swartkrans don't prove that man's ancestors cooked their meat. Sutton would want clearer ev

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