A forgotten settlement in the Cradle of Humankind adds a note to southern African history
About 50km outside South Africa's biggest city, Johannesburg, lies one of the most important sites in human prehistory: the Cradle of Humankind. Here, at sites like the Sterkfontein Caves, Swartkrans, Drimolen and Kromdraai, researchers have unearthed amazing fossil evidence from the Plio-Pleistocene (the last five million years). It is especially famous for the discovery of fossilized hominin—ancient human—remains.
But there is a more recent and largely neglected layer to the landscape's history. My colleagues and I set out to investigate some archaeological traces found in part of the Cradle of Humankind. We focused on a stone-walled structure on a hill known as Driefontein; the name also given to the site we studied.
Our findings suggest that the Driefontein stone-walled structure was a residential area. It appears similar to settlements found elsewhere in South Africa's North West province and parts of Botswana dating to between AD 1450 and 1700, though certain features possibly suggest a later date. Read more.
