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Often we spend a fortune travelling overseas, and we ignore the fabulous destinations right on our doorstep. And – especially for Gautengers – one of those is the Cradle of Humankind.
But if you’ve never visited there, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about – after all, it’s just a bunch of old bones, isn’t it? Well, yes. And no. The whole Cradle of Humankind area is a series of limestone caves with quite possibly the richest assemblage of hominin fossils in the world. With the stunningly informative but also fun and funky Maropeng Visitor’s Centre, restaurant, adjacent hotel, huge interactive displays and guided tours, it’s easy to think this is just another piece of tourist hype, but there is more to it than that. This area holds one of the keys to understanding human evolution – or at least getting closer to understanding it.
We have a pretty good idea how we evolved in broad general terms but the details are sketchy, and they’ve been the subject of not a few academic spats that have – so far – fortunately not come to blows. The first thing to realise is that, despite the great marketing-speak, the fossils displayed at Maropeng are not those of our direct ancestors. At best, they’re distant cousins. But we are programmed to think of human evolution as a neat, linear progression ‘from monkey to man’ – largely due to that lovely ‘March of Progress’ illustration by Rudolph Zallinger that we’ve all seen on a hundred T-shirts – usually parodied to represent humans evolving into surfers, or regressing into hunched-over computer nerds. But it didn’t happen that way.
Evolution is not a planned, purposeful progress. Giraffes did not develop longer necks by stretching to reach higher branches. The ones with longer necks managed to survive better when food became scarce because they could reach the food others couldn’t – and they bred with equally tall giraffes, so their offspring were taller … and their offspring were taller … until the shorties starved and died out. Evolution is fuelled by extremes – extreme cold, extreme heat, drought, ice ages, famine – not by average conditions.
And, in the same way, human evolution is not a purposeful progression towards a big brain, which we tend to think of as the ultimate adaptation. In the process of evolving from whatever our common ancestor with chimps actually looked like, we’ve tried out many mutations, taken many diversions, many wrong turns … and many dead ends. And the fossils at Maropeng are the remains of some of those.
In 1924, when Raymond Dart identified the fossil that came to be known as the Taung Child, the international scientific community ganged up on him, claiming it was a chimp fossil, because – at that stage – everyone ‘knew’ that humans evolved in Europe, or possibly Asia, but definitely not Africa. That ‘knowledge’ was fuelled largely by the discovery just over a decade earlier (in 1912) of the ‘missing link’ near Piltdown in Sussex in England. This ‘fossil’ was clearly a link between apes and humans, as it had a large brain, and associated bones and artefacts indicated that it used tools, but did not walk upright – pretty much exactly what the experts of the day had predicted. The creature was called Eoanthropus dawsoni, Dawn man of Dawson, which gave its discoverer Charles Dawson his 15 minutes of fame. It was more familiarly known as Piltdown Man.
Dart was less egotistic in naming his discovery Australopithecus africanus, the southern ape of Africa, but it is usually called the Taung Child, after the quarry where it was found. And when, in 1936, Robert Broom from the Transvaal Museum found another A. africanus fossil at Sterkfontein, it, too, was largely ignored by the international scientific community. A whole slew of fossil discoveries followed, including the exhumation of everyone’s favourite not-even-remotely-great-granny, Mrs Ples.
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By the late 1940s, scientists were starting to doubt the authenticity of Piltdown Man because, unlike the South African fossils, which seemed to be plentiful, there was only one Piltdown Man, and no-one else had found anything in the same area. By 1953, a combination of modern dating techniques and clever detective work revealed Piltdown Man as an elaborate hoax consisting of a well-constructed melange of human, orang-utan and chimpanzee parts. And only then was the scientific world ready to consider Australopithecus.
But, just as the world was starting to accept that Africa might be the home of human ancestors, two things happened. The first was that, as apartheid started approaching its zenith, much of the rest of the world started realising it was not such a good thing. So South African palaeontologists were like the unpopular kid at the party – it doesn’t matter if you have the best toys, you still can’t play with us. The fiercely Calvinist apartheid government also didn’t really like the idea that we were all evolved from apes in the first place, and African apes in the second, so the research was not given much support either at home or abroad. And secondly, the Leakeys and others working in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania were uncovering fossil sites that were almost as rich as those in the Cradle –and they weren’t tainted by apartheid – so international academics could study African fossils without running foul of the academic boycott.
But, since 1994, attitudes have changed. We are proud of our African origins, and we celebrate the richness of our palaeontological heritage. A visit to Maropeng is a life-changing experience – it contextualises and emphasises the fragile implausibility of our existence, and then culminates in an eye-opening exploration of how we are changing the world, and where that’s likely to take us. It’s a wild ride for kids of all ages, and you can combine it with a tour through Sterkfontein and a fab lunch somewhere nearby, so make a day of it. Or a weekend.
Unusual suspects
For years, scientists tried to figure out who had actually created Piltdown Man (as Dawson was considered too dim to have done it himself) and the most noteworthy of the unusual suspects was Arthur Conan Doyle – the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was posthumously cleared of all suspicion in 1983, when it was figured out that the rogue lone wolf pseudo-scientist Dawson actually did do it all himself. Pathetic, really. It wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes seventy years to solve the case. Pity he was just as fictional as Piltdown Man – but far more entertaining.
www.maropeng.co.za
