3.67 million year old fossils found a mere 40 kms from Liz at Lancaster
My son, grandsons and I decided it was time for an excursion out of Jozi. The Sterkfontein Caves, closed to the public in 2022 for infrastructural improvements after heavy flooding, reopened in April 2025 under the direct custodianship of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). So what better than an adventure in the Cradle of Humankind. It is extraordinary to have one of the most productive and significant paleoanthropological sites in the world right on our doorstep – over 700 hominin specimens dating back 3.67 million years (maybe longer) have been found in these caves . This is a third of all early hominin fossils ever discovered.
Wits Sterkfontein Caves re-opened as tourist site in April 2025
Encountering a bit of a road delay on the way, we arrived a little late and hurried to get our hairnets (not the most flattering of fashion items) and hardhats before joining our tour. Gift, our tour guide, was giving a brief introduction to the site, its history and its significance. As an aside, in my past life I was a lecturer at Wits and the Co-ordinator of a Postgraduate course in Tourism and Culture. One of the projects the students were asked to do was to explore ways in which sights/sites (which do not ‘speak’ for themselves), are made meaningful or significant. Some of these ways are via museums, information boards, guiding, – all of which are applicable at Sterkfontein. Gift’s narrative of the significance of the Cradle and the caves was interesting, as he emphasized both what they teach us about climate change, geology, and our ancestors, while also making linkages between scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge systems.
Deep time
The cave area is a comparatively large dolomite limestone cave system that started forming a mind-boggling 20- 30 million years ago. It consists of about five kilometres of intersecting chambers and passages, and several entrances which have been active in the past.
Economic significance of the caves: 1896 – 1939
Although there is evidence of settlements in the area as far back as 1 500 years ago with more recent architectural remains of Sesotho- and Setswana-speaking people, there is little reference to the significance/importance of the caves for local inhabitants historically. The caves enter public consciousness in the late 18th Century when they became significant as a mining ground for limestone. Lime is used to make cement, a commodity which was crucial for gold mining. In addition it was a central component in the gold extraction process, neutralizing the cyanide acid used to draw the gold out of the gold-bearing rocks. It seems the Italian prospector Guglielmo Martinaglia has a lot to answer for because it was he who, in 1896, first blasted the caves with dynamite to remove the mineral rich stalactites and stalagmites. Who knows how many fossil records were obliterated?
The search for our origins at Sterkfontein
After similar mining blastings in the Buxton limeworks near Taung in 1924, local quarry men sent a box of fossil-bearing rocks or breccia, to anthroplogist/paleontologist Prof Raymond Dart. Amongst this breccia Dart found a small hominid skull which he identified as a 2.5 million year old skull of a species he named Australopithecus africanus. It was to become known as the Taung Skull. Sadly Dart’s findings were not believed by the international community for decades. But South Africa continued its search which would prove that humankind originated in Africa.
Back to Sterkfontein: In 1936, Robert Broom, head of Anatomy at Wits, visited the Sterkfontein caves in search of hominid fossils.
Although mining in the caves finally stopped in 1939, Broom continued visiting the caves and in 1947, after blasting through the rock, he discovered an adult cranium of a 3.6 million year old Australopithecus — affectionately nicknamed “Mrs Ples” (short for Plesianthropus, an old classification). In 1958, the Stegmann family, who had owned the farm Zwartkrans (where the Sterkfontein Caves were located), donated the land around the caves to Wits. And from 1966 onwards, the informal dig site began to fall under more formalized activities overseen by Phillip Tobias, anatomist and palaeo-anthropologist at Wits. In the mid 1970s Tobias and a PhD student, Ron Clarke, arranged for a large pile of breccia, to be brought out of the caves (over a 3 year period). Some of the fossil bones found in the breccia were then put away in boxes in a room at Sterkfontein. As happens with boxes in storage, they remained unopened for about 14 years, until in 1994, Ron Clarke decided to take a further look. After many days and many many bones later, he emptied a bag labelled “monkey foot bones”. Upon finding an ankle bone, he told his wife that evening that this was a hominid bone and NOT a monkey bone. And so the extraordinary search for the rest of the skeleton began.
In July 1997 Stephen Motsumi and Nkwane Molefe began searching for matches to the small bone. In their second day of searching in the Silberberg Cave, Stephen found a broken bone in the wall of the cave which matched up with the small bone in his hand, bones which had been broken from each other during mine blasting some 7 decades earlier. It took a further 20 years of careful excavation to remove and clean the rest of the female skeleton.
Named “Little Foot”, thought to be Australopithecus Prometheus, she was finally revealed in “completed” form in 2017 as one of the most complete early hominin skeletons ever found. Potentially dating back more than 3.4 million years, it makes her contemporaries of the famous “Lucy” skeleton found in Ethiopia.
Once we were sea
Gift talked about the significance to spiritual healers of the water in the lake lying at the deepest point of our tour. Here indigenous knowledge and science meet: The water in this lake is both spiritually healing and chemically pure. It is fed by the surface water seeping through gaps in the rocks being treated by the calcium carbonate ensuring a perfect PH balance of 7.5 and crystal clarity.
World heritage status
Although the Nationalist Government underplayed Sterkfontein’s significance in terms of understanding evolution (anathema to strict Christian biblical orthodoxy), it did declare the caves a national monument in 1945. But in 1999 the entire 47,000-hectare area of the Cradle of Humankind was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its outstanding contribution to our understanding of human origins.
Other key sites include:
- Swartkrans, known for early evidence of fire use and stone tools.
- Kromdraai, another site where Australopithecus fossils have been found.
- Malapa Cave Australopithecus Sediba found in 2008
- Rising Star Cave, where the enigmatic Homo naledi was discovered in 2013 — a species with a small brain but surprisingly complex behavior.
Management of the site
From 2001, the tourist operations at the Sterkfontein Caves were operated by Maropeng as part of the Cradle of Humankind UNESCO World Heritage Site interpretation centre. Since the reopening in April 2025 after the flooding, all tourist operations at Sterkfontein and Swartkrans Caves are under the management of Wits University hence the name change to Wits Sterkfontein Caves. And based on our experiences they are doing a brilliant job.
Make sure you make time to visit the on-site museum – small manageable and informative.
OPERATING HOURS: Tuesday to Sunday – 9am to 16:00.
Tours of 60-90 mins are every hour on the hour with a max of 30 per tour
Ticket Prices: Adults: R150 ; Pensioners (60+ Years): R100; Kids (6-18 years): R125; Kids (Under 6 years): Free
Perfect way to end our Cradle of Humankind Day
…a shared tacos-types lunch at “And then there was Fire” at Nirox. What a totally brilliant day!
