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<< Our Photo Pages >> Wonderwerk Cave - Cave or Rock Shelter in South Africa

Submitted by Jackdaw1 on Thursday, 05 April 2012  Page Views: 11891

Natural PlacesSite Name: Wonderwerk Cave
Country: South Africa
NOTE: This site is 45.99 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Kuruman  Nearest Village: Danielskuil
Latitude: 27.845S  Longitude: 23.553889E
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
4 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data 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.
no data 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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Wonderwerk Cave
Wonderwerk Cave submitted by Andy B : View from the excavated area towards the entrance of Wonderwerk Cave Credit: R. Yates Site in South Africa (Vote or comment on this photo)
Wonderwerk Cave is an archaeological site, formed originally as an ancient solution cavity in Dolomite rocks of the Kuruman Hills in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa. The cave contains up to 6 m depth of archaeological deposits reflecting human and environmental history through the Earlier, Middle and Later Stone Ages to the present.

Accumulted deposits inside the cave reflect natural sedimentation processes such as water and wind deposition as well as the activities of animals, birds and human ancestors over a period of some 2 million years. The site has been studied and excavated by archaeologists since the 1940s and research here generates important insights into human history in the subcontinent of Southern Africa.

Cosmogenic dating suggests that basal sediment entered the cave some 2 million years ago. Rock art occurs in the form of parietal paintings within the first 40 metres from the entrance, possibly all less than 1000 years old, and small engraved stones found within the deposit, mainly from the Later Stone Age sequence where they date back some 10 500 years.

It is a National Heritage Site managed from the McGregor Museum in Kimberley.

Read more at Wikipedia

Note: Wonderwerk Cave excavation shows fire used 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. "Socializing around a camp fire might actually be an essential aspect of what makes us human."
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Wonderwerk Cave
Wonderwerk Cave submitted by Andy B : The cave entrance. Credit: University of Toronto Site in South Africa (Vote or comment on this photo)

Wonderwerk Cave
Wonderwerk Cave submitted by Andy B : A researcher surveys the area outside Wonderwerk, a massive cave located near the edge of the Kalahari where earlier excavations had uncovered an extensive record of human occupation. Credit: University of Toronto Site in South Africa (Vote or comment on this photo)

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"Wonderwerk Cave" | Login/Create an Account | 3 News and Comments
  
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Re: Wonderwerk Cave by Anonymous on Friday, 06 April 2012
Anyone that spends a lot of time outdoors, all year, round a campfire knows how important a fire is (and always has been). Hot drinks in the snow can really boost morale. Apart from the obvious heat, light and cooking ability, a campfire is a focal point for us humans. They are mesmerising. Flickering firelight is programmed into us. It is immensely satisfying to build a fire and light it with a flint striker and some birch bark (everything always comes back to flint eventually in my mind). When we all lived in the woods a fire would have been a critical part of life. Being able to cut and harvest fuel would have been a life saving skill for several months of the year . . . and that leads me to flint axes . . .
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Wonderwerk Cave shows fire used 300,000 years earlier than previously thought by Andy B on Thursday, 05 April 2012
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Humans used fire a million years ago

An international team led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years ago at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

“The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300,000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life,” said U of T anthropologist Michael Chazan, co-director of the project and director of U of T’s Archaeology Centre. The research was published in the Proceedings of the [US] National Academy of Sciences on April 2.

Wonderwerk is a massive cave located near the edge of the Kalahari where earlier excavations by Peter Beaumont of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa, had uncovered an extensive record of human occupation. A research project, co-directed by U of T’s Chazan and Liora Kolska Horwitz of Hebrew University, has been doing detailed analysis of the material from Beaumont's excavation along with renewed field work on the Wonderwerk site.

Analysis of sediment by lead authors Francesco Berna and Paul Goldberg (pictured below right) of Boston University revealed ashed plant remains and burned bone fragments, both of which appear to have been burned locally rather than carried into the cave by wind or water. The researchers also found extensive evidence of surface discoloration that is typical of burning.

Paul Goldberg excavating inside of the dig site.“The control of fire would have been a major turning point in human evolution,” said Chazan. “The impact of cooking food is well documented, but the impact of control over fire would have touched all elements of human society.

"Socializing around a camp fire might actually be an essential aspect of what makes us human.”

Funding for the research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation. Other team members include James Brink and Sharon Holt of the National Museum, Bloemfontein, Marion Bamford of the University of Witswatersrand and Ari Matmon and Hagai Ron of Hebrew University. Research at Wonderwerk Cave is carried out in collaboration with the McGregor Museum, Kimberley and under permit for the South African Heritage Resources Agency.

Source: University of Toronto

With thanks to Jackdaw1 for the link
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Stone Age tools go south by Andy B on Thursday, 05 April 2012
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Submitted by coldrum on Friday, 06 February 2009

Although separated by several thousand kilometers, southern and eastern Africa were, in a sense, a stone’s throw from each other ancient times. New evidence suggests that human ancestors in southern Africa fashioned teardrop-shaped stone hand axes 1.6 million years ago, nearly twice as long ago as many researchers thought and about the time such tools are known to have first appeared in eastern Africa.

Ryan Gibbon and his colleagues dated hand axes and related stone implements, collectively known as Acheulean artifacts, using measures of the relative decay of radioactive forms of aluminum and beryllium in quartz grains from the soil and gravel bearing the artifacts. Exposure to cosmic radiation causes quartz to produce these substances, which then decay after enough sediment covers the quartz.

Acheulean finds have been dated to 1.7 million years ago in Ethiopia. Less-advanced stone tools have been dated to as early as 2.5 million years ago in eastern Africa.

Over two days in 2005, Gibbon’s group identified 465 stone tools brought out of a diamond-mining pit bordering South Africa’s Vaal River, near the town of Windsorton. Those implements included 10 hand axes, two hand axes with large chopping edges known as cleavers and two elongated, three-sided tools called picks. The researchers have since recovered another 100 hand axes, 30 cleavers and 40 picks from the Windsorton pit. Sand and gravel from five diamond-mining pits provided samples for dating, says Gibbon, an archaeology graduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Findings at Windsorton, published online December 20 in the Journal of Human Evolution, raise the question of whether human ancestors developed Acheulean tools independently in southern and eastern Africa at around the same time, developed the tools in only one area from which the tool-making tradition spread rapidly to distant regions.

Gibbon suspects that Homo ergaster, a species regarded as a direct ancestor of modern humans, made the Windsorton hand axes. A nearby South African site has yielded H. ergaster fossils, but no fossils of any member of the human evolutionary family have been found in the Windsorton vicinity. Fossil finds have linked H. ergaster to Acheulean tools in eastern Africa.

Stanford University archaeologist Richard Klein suspects that Acheulean tool making originated in eastern Africa about 1.7 million years ago and reached northern parts of what’s now South Africa shortly afterward. “I doubt it arose more than once,” he says.

“East Africa has always been considered the place of origin of stone tools and subsequent technological developments, but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that significant stone-tool advances took place in the Vaal River basin and then spread to the rest of Africa,” Gibbon says.

His team’s findings support a preliminary age estimate of 1.6 million years that other researchers have reported for Acheulean artifacts from South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave, located about 100 kilometers northwest of Windsorton. Anthropologist Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto and his coworkers dated quartz grains from artifact-bearing soil and further verified the ages by identifying reversals of Earth’s magnetic field with known ages in the cave’s sediment. Their study appeared in the July Journal of Human Evolution.

Additional dating of Wonderwerk Cave deposits has confirmed that Acheulean activity there began 1.6 million years ago, with even older stone tools dating to 2 million years ago, Chazan says.

Still, the precise timing of Acheulean origins in eastern and southern Africa remains uncertain. “There could easily be a time lag between the two regions on the order of 100,000 years, in either direction, that we are not yet able to detect,” Chazan remarks.

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