Makapansgat - History of Discoveries in Makapansgat Valley

History of Discoveries in Makapansgat Valley

Makansgat Valley has been described as having one of the greatest palaeontological records of human evolution in the world. Collecting at the site began in 1925, when a local school teacher, Wilfred Eitzman, was attracted by the activities of limeworkers. Some fossil material was sent to Raymond Dart, who initiated a systematic investigation in 1947.

The rocks that Professor Dart received from Mr Eitzman turned out to contain, amongst others, blackened fossil bones which led him to believe that they had been burnt. Although no hominid remains or stone tools were found at first, he concluded that these were the remains of bones burnt in fireplaces and therefore that Mokapansgat was a site of early hominid occupation. Dart named the first hominids discovered at the site Australopithecus prometheus after the mythological Greek hero who stole fire from the Gods. Afterwards the black markings turned out to be manganese stains and Australopithecus prometheus were recognised as specimens of Australopithecus africanus. After analysing 7,159 fossil bones, Dart concluded that these creatures, in an era before stone tools were discovered, used tools made from bone, teeth and horn, naming it the Osteodontokeratic Culture.

In 1936, the Historical Monuments Commission (South Africa) was asked to declare Makapan's Cave a National Monument and Professor Clarence van Riet Lowe, Secretary of the commission and Director of the Archaeological Survey of the Union of South Africa, visited the site in 1937. He inspected the Historic Cave and discovered, close by, an abandoned limeworker’s adit that cut through a calcified cave infill. In this infill he saw fossil bones, stone tools, and what he took to be ash horizons representing ancient hearths. At first he referred to it as part of Makapan's Cave, but he later renamed it "The Cave of Hearths".

Further research during June and October 1937 revealed the Rainbow Cave. The site was visited by Clarence Van Riet Lowe, Raymond Dart, and Robert Broom. H. B. S. Cooke of the Geology Department of the University of the Witwatersrand conducted a geological survey of the area (1941) followed by L. C. King in 1951.

In July 1945, Philip Tobias led a group of students to the valley, where they discovered the "Hyaena Cave" next to Van Riet Lowe's site. Further down the valley, from a cave next to the limeworks, they collected a large fossil horse's lower jaw, which supplied a name for the “Cave of the Horse's Mandible”.

After these discoveries, Dr Bernard Price made a research grant available for systematic excavations, which started at the Cave of Hearths in 1947, with field work being carried out by Guy Gardiner, James Kitching, and his brothers Ben and Scheepers. One of the most significant discoveries was a Homo lower jaw from Bed 3, by Ben. In 1953, Dr R. J. Mason was placed in charge of the excavations. The stratigraphic sequence was determined during 1953–1954.

After the Kitching brothers discovered an ape-man braincase amongst the limeworks dumps in 1947, Dart organised for the lime miner's dumps to be hand-sorted to recover as much fossil-bearing material as possible. After 45 years of research, many thousands of fossils from this site have been identified and catalogued.

Brian Maguire studied rocks which were brought into the caves during prehistoric times (1965, 1968, 1980). He interpreted this to represent rudimentary stone tool making activities dated at around 2.3 – 1.6 million years ago, however, recent analysis has shown this to be incorrect.

Recent work at the sites in the late 1990s and early 2000s was done by these groups:

• the Makapansgat Fieldschool, run jointly by Kaye Reed of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University (US) and Kevin Kuykendall of the University of the Witwatersrand (SA) and later the University of Sheffield (UK);
• the Makapan Middle Pleistocene Research project, run by Anthony Sinclair, Patrick Quinney of the University of Liverpool (UK) and later John McNabb of the University of Southampton (UK.).
• Alf Latham, Ginette Warr (U. liverpool, UK), and Andy Herries (La Trobe University, Australia) did Geochronological and stratigraphic work for both projects.