Day 10 (Friday Sept. 15th)
Sterkfontein Caves to Kuruman.
Our night at the Days Inn was splendid and I at least, awoke feeling
refreshed and excited to visit the Sterkfontein Caves. Every year in his
classes Joe relates to us the gory tale of human catfood, with limp bodies hung
from tree branches over the cave opening, bones raining down on a grisly
midden. He even displays schematic diagrams that show how perfectly a leopard
jawbone extends from the holes punctured in several juvenile hominid skulls to
the eye sockets, suggesting not only a method of dispatch, but also a
method of transportation. In the Transvaal museum we saw the actual skulls that
suggested such nightmarish images.
Our first task this morning was a sad one: we left Ben (and several of the
larger rock samples we'd collected) at Nick Beukes' home so he could return to
the states. After enjoying the hospitality and African-style architecture of
their home, we traveled to the Sterkfontein caves to meet Francis Thackeray.
He took us to the site where Mrs. Ples, the most complete Plesianthropus
skull, was discovered. While there, he asked us to notice any stratigraphy in the
talus cone (we didn't see any) and then related to us the tale of the discovery
of Mrs. Ples. Robert Broom, the discoverer and force behind much of the
anthropology that occurred at Sterkfontein, was criticized by geologists for
ignoring the stratigraphic position of the fossils he uncovered. The criticism
was so harsh he was eventually banned from doing further research at the
site.
Angered at being ousted from his deserved position by persons who had never
visited Sterkfontein themselves, he asked miners to blast a site in spite of
the injunction. When the dust cleared, there lay Mrs. Ples, in two pieces
but otherwise complete. Broom's post was saved.
The talus cone is now above ground, the overlying rock having eroded away
centuries before. Caves are still forming below ground and we next visited a
part of one. We descended a long, long set of stairs and came to a spectacular
chamber filled with flowstone and alien rock sculptures. Looking up we saw a
hole in the ceiling and above it the outline of a tree branch -- exactly the
situation in Sterkfontein millions of years ago. It quite nicely illustrated
to us exactly how a Sterkfontein talus cone could have formed.
It was hard to leave the caves, but we had two more stops to make before
lunch. We next visited Komdrai, another site with hominid fossils. Komdrai
consists of two "caves" (really just holes in the ground since the overlying
4-6 m of overlying rock have worn away), designated cave A and cave B.
Deposition of sediments and artifacts within these two caves was not constant,
and the number and type of artifacts is different in each cave. Cave A
contains many carnivore bones and stone tools that Paranthapus and
Australopithicus made millions of years ago. Cave B has many fewer bones but
the type specimen for A. Robustus was found here. Francis Thackeray told us
that in 1938 a boy found the jawbone of Robustus and offered to sell the teeth
to Robert Broom for a shilling a piece. Dr. Broom was so excited about the
discovery he went straight to the boy's school, but the nun in charge of the
boy's class refused to let him out early. So Dr. Broom was forced to wait
until the end of the school day.
Swartkraans, named for the black manganese stains on its walls, was the next
fossil locality we visited. Three main layers of sediment contain bones and
tools made of stone, bone, and horns. Fossilized fauna give a date of about
1.7 million years for these deposits. Within the third layer of the sequence
we find the most interesting artifacts: burned bones. Little else changes;
these bones are found in association with similar horn and stone tools as in
earlier sequences. Although there is much debate on the subject, this evidence
suggests hominids discovered how to use fire for cooking around 1.7 million
years ago.
But one of the most amazing things to me was the juxtaposition of fossilized
stromatillites, or primitive algal mat communities from billions of years ago,
with mouse bones dropped by who knows how many owls 1.7 million years ago. The
change from those single-celled creatures that lived together out of sheer
necessity in the shallow Cambrian seas to the multicellular owls and mice, and
the interdependence of the predator-prey relationship on top of it all is
mind-boggling. I am continually amazed at the changes and the evolution we see
in the geologic record, from single cells fighting against sand and drought to
complex symbiosis between organisms, and perhaps to top it all off, that we are
able to contemplate these changes. And amazingly enough, many processes, the
build-up of mountains and the continual wearing down of the same mountains,
stays the same.
At lunch we met up with a reporter, named Gabriel Walker, from The New
Scientist. She came to talk to Joe and see the evidence for low-latitude
glaciations or the "snowball Earth" hypothesis. We then had a ~5 hour drive
west on the N-12 to the town of Kuruman, where we crashed at the local caravan
park. As we approached the town we were treated to a magnificent lightning
display, as only the Kalahari Desert can produce. Tim reassured us the
lightning was heat lightning and rain was unlikely. Predictably, shortly
before we reached Kuruman it started to rain. The caravan park had several
bungalows available, so we did not need to pitch our tents in the poring rain.
We split up for dinner, initially into two groups. The group I went with chose
between a fast dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken or waiting to get into the
local pub. I wasn't terribly hungry and didn't feel like getting dinner some
thousands of miles from home at a restaurant that started less than two miles
from my home, so I, along with Shane, Antonin, and Gabriel decided to wait for
a table in the pub. It was quite the experience. The bar tender was neither
the owner nor at all sober. He was a very nice man and told us stories of his
experiences in Kuruman, several times. The bar had the definite feeling of an
old boy's club, with men being raucous and loud and grabbing at any woman who
walked within a meter or two. I could sense this was one of the final places
where white, apartheid attitudes were the norm, and could see what a shock the
end of apartheid must have been to these people. Exhausted as we were, we
drove back to the caravan park and gladly took the spots left on the bungalow's
dirty linoleum floors.
Written by Kristine
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