We've come to the last full day in South Africa.
Yesterday we did the Cradle of Humanity (about an hour's drive north east of Jo'burg). The tour is in two parts - the first bit is a tour through the Sterkfontein limestone caves where in 1947 they found a couple of nearly complete 2-3 million year old fossilised skeletons of the genus Australopithecus africanus, one of the direct forebears of our own genus, the various cough varieties. They already knew about Australopithecus because an Australian called Dart working at the University of Witwatersrand in 1924 had found a fossil of a baby, and the later findings in the Sterkfontein Caves virtually proved that Africa was the place where cough sapiens eventually developed 200-300,000 years ago.
The limestone cave tour proved rather heavy going for me - 292 steep stairs to climb to get out and a couple of places where you had to crawl through short tunnels on hands and knees - not ideal for old bones nor my trousers!
Then the second stop was the tumulus museum at Maropeng which tries to combine a kiddie's amusement park with a serious museum (not altogether successfully).
But the most amazing exhibit was of their latest acquisition, from a discovery in a nearby set of caves made only in September 2013, and not announced until 2015. These were the fossilised skeletons of dozens of hominids which proved to belong to a hitherto unknown genus which they called cough naledi. They were short creatures who stood erect, had smaller brains than us, but larger than chimps, hands and feet virtually identical with ours, but different rib cages and shoulder and upper arm bones, more akin to chimpanzees. But the most remarkable thing about them was where the fossils were found - in a series of very deep caves, which all the evidence seemed to suggest were specific burial sites for these early hominids - there was no evidence that they ever lived in these caves, nor that they had been brought there to be eaten by some predators, nor that they had fallen in through sump holes, or been washed in by flood water.
So these newly found little people are the first who show evidence of performing rituals and honouring their dead, something that distinguishes us from the other primates. As yet they haven't exactly dated these specimens of the newly found cough naledi, but no doubt they will announce their findings in a few years. I thought this was all quite fascinating.
We had dinner last night in one of the restaurants in Nelson Mandela Square. I'm pleased to report that the name had no apostrophe.
On to Rome, via Madrid on Iberia tomorrow.
