A Nemeth/Star Productions ORIGINAL
Humanities origin is in Africa.
Two places are known with enough fossil evidence to be called
the earliest place where humans lived once.
One of these places is in Hadar, Ethiopia.
The other
in Maropeng.
It’s the CRADLE OF HUMANKIND
Orbit Mzansi: Travel - S00E02 The Cradle of Humankind
Speaker Jennifer Sarah Boone
Written and Directed by Sven Nemeth
50 kilometers northwest of Jozi,
we are entering the UNESCO World Heritage site and
47,000 hectares huge area with multiply limestone caves named:
The Cradle of Humankind.
Today we are going underground into the Sterkfontein Caves.
These Caves are one of more than three dozen fossil-bearing caves in the area.
Down here, and back in 1947,
Robert Broom and John T. Robinson found a 2.3-million-year-old fossil
of the Australopithecus africanus also named Mrs. Ples.
The most bones in the Sterkfontein caves are found in rocks, like this one.
It is a fragment of two bones and parts of a tooth.
Some of the hominin fossils found in the
Cradle of Humankind date back 3.5 million years ago.
We are down inside the Sterkfontein caves, a set of limestone caves.
Sterkfontein means "Strong Spring" in Afrikaans language.
The area here is named Muldersdrift, close to the town of Krugersdorp
once the home of the South African Anglican cleric,
theologian and peace activist Desmond Tutu.
The Caves are the home to numerous wild African species
including a huge population of the wasp species Belonogaster petiolate.
As limestone miners noticed the fossils in the late 1890s,
the caves brought attention to scientists.
The caves revealed the first adult Australopithecine during the extraction of 1936.
Professor Raymond Dart strengthen his claims
that the skull known as the Taung child was a human ancestor.
World War II stopped the excavation of the
caves until Dr. Robert broom continued the work.
In 1947,
he found a nearly complete skull of an adult female today known as Mrs. Ples.
Mrs. Ples is date to be 2.05 to 2.01 million years old.
3 other fossils are also dated to be 2.6 to 2 million years old.
Millions of years ago an inland sea covered this area.
The traces of the water are still visible on the rocks
and was responsible of how the cave formed.
The deepest part of the cave is 60 meters below the surface.
The limestone is shining in the light of the torch.
Stalactites, rising downwards from the top of the cave.
Liquide Calcium carbonate drops down to the cave
ground and forms the stalagmites of the cave.
As more Liquide Calcium carbonate drops down the
more Stalagmites are rising from the ground up.
When a pair of stalactites and stalagmites found, geologists are calling
it a pillar regarding the form of a natural pillar from ground to top.
A stone fossil of an elephant is the highlight of the cave.
2 front legs, 1 back leg have been stoned over the year millions.
This big stone in front of us a flowstone but not only this.
It is the broken ear of the elephant formed like a map of Africa.
Left from the elephant fossil we have rocks of calcite.
These calcite rocks have formed alongside the cave wall.
The shiny stones looking like diamonds and made of silica.
Flowstones are formed where water flows down the walls or along the floors of a cave.
It took 50 years until Ronald J. Clark found a nearly complete skeleton of a
second species of the Australopithecus africanus called “australopith” in 1997.
The skeleton, named Little Foot is estimated to be around 2.6 to 2.2 million years
old based on a combination of uranium-lead dating and palaeomagnetic analysis.
In contrast to this analysis are the sediments of the surface exposure dating.
They are the dating Little Foot to an age of approximately 4 million years.
Based of analysis of calcite or other carbonate
minerals created Flowstones at the location
of Little Foot showed that they have formed
after the skeleton around 3 million years ago.
Excavations continue to this day and finds now 500 hominids.
This makes Sterkfontein to one of the richest sites in the worlds for early hominids.
The Swartkrans cave homes the second-largest sample of hominid remains from the
Cradle and keeps the traces of the oldest controlled use of fire by the Homo erectus.
It burned over 1 million years ago.
Lee Berger commissioned geologist Pedro Boshoff to investigate
the cave systems of the Cradle of Humankind in October 2013.
At the same time, the Cavers Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker discovered hominid
fossils in an unexplored area of the Rising Star/Westminster Cave System.
In November 2013, Lee Berger led a joint expedition of the University of
the Witwatersrand and National Geographic Society into the Cave system.
K. Lindsay Eaves, Marina Elliott, Elen Feuerriegel, Alia
Gurtov, Hannah Morris, and Becca Peixotto formed the six women
team and in only 3 months, they recovered over 1,200
specimens of a presently unidentified fossil hominin species.
In September 2015, they published the found of the extinct species...
...Homo Naledi.
Which is the most extensive discovery of a single hominid species.
Over the time, the hominin remains of the Cradle
of Humankind have fossilized in dolomitic
caves and often encased in a mixture of
limestone and other sediments called breccia.
7 kilometers from the Sterkfontein caves is the Maropeng Visitors Centre.
It collects all information, some fossils and replicas
around the excavations in the Cradle of Humankind.
All these are paired with some action adventures like
a boat trip through the history of our ancient planet.
The Visitors Centre was opened on December 7th
2005 by former South African President Thabo Mbeki.
The heart peace of the Maropeng Visitors Centre is
outside of the complex, next to the parking lot.
It is the collection of statues of South African
and African freedom fighters and tribe leaders.
The collection begins at the end with the leaders of the South African tribes
and ends in the front with the freedom fighters of the apartheid area.
This is South Africa’s Long March to Freedom….
This movie was not financially supported by any
company or trademark who may was shown in this movie.
Some Original Content filmed for this production is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
This Movie is licensed under Creative Commons Share-A-Like 4.0 (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
subtitles translated by Sven Nemeth, ChatGPT, Google Translate, Maryam Vazirnia.