Beneath South Africa's surface, history is marked by bones and stones
The empty eye sockets of the battered half-skull stared at me, lifeless, sightless and silent. They were topped by a heavy brow ridge of bone, and the upper jaw of the creature's broad face jutted forward. Not fully human but recognizably related, it sent a shiver down my spine as I looked across 12 inches of space and 2 1/2 million years in time.
There is something deeply humbling about coming face to face with one of humanity's distant early relatives, a practical demonstration of one's own utter insignificance as an individual.
Stw 505 does not, unlike some hominid fossils, have a friendly nickname. He -- the fossil is believed to be that of an adult male Australopithecus africanus -- was around 25 years old when he apparently fell into a sinkhole in the rolling grasslands north of what is now Johannesburg and died. His remains were covered in sediment, turned to stone over thousands of years and lay buried until scientists discovered them in 1989.
For an object lesson -- literally -- in the origins of the human family, nothing compares with the Cradle of Humankind, as the area has been dubbed. The oldest hominid fossils in the world have been found in East Africa -- particularly Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and Chad -- but the southern end of the continent also has a strong claim to being where our genus, Homo, first emerged: something of an evolutionary Garden of Eden.
Most visitors to South Africa in the next two months will be going for soccer's World Cup. But perhaps in their downtime they'd want to take two very different but equally fascinating side trips within two hours of Johannesburg: to the Cradle of Humankind and to the diamond mine in the town of Cullinan....
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There is something deeply humbling about coming face to face with one of humanity's distant early relatives, a practical demonstration of one's own utter insignificance as an individual.
Stw 505 does not, unlike some hominid fossils, have a friendly nickname. He -- the fossil is believed to be that of an adult male Australopithecus africanus -- was around 25 years old when he apparently fell into a sinkhole in the rolling grasslands north of what is now Johannesburg and died. His remains were covered in sediment, turned to stone over thousands of years and lay buried until scientists discovered them in 1989.
For an object lesson -- literally -- in the origins of the human family, nothing compares with the Cradle of Humankind, as the area has been dubbed. The oldest hominid fossils in the world have been found in East Africa -- particularly Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and Chad -- but the southern end of the continent also has a strong claim to being where our genus, Homo, first emerged: something of an evolutionary Garden of Eden.
Most visitors to South Africa in the next two months will be going for soccer's World Cup. But perhaps in their downtime they'd want to take two very different but equally fascinating side trips within two hours of Johannesburg: to the Cradle of Humankind and to the diamond mine in the town of Cullinan....