Page 53 -

War map

of the humans in the golden grasslands of – and I could not help thinking, as I became
the Magaliesberg/Cradle hills. It takes the swallowed up by the narrative and the
reader through the last 1,2 million years - pictures, that there’s no way the electronic
from the Stone Age through to the Iron Age, media can compete with this class of book
whose crumbled settlements and furnaces – so easy to hold, so compact, so navigable,
are still there to see. The book looks at the so enthralling to read at one’s own pace,
wars that swished about these valleys when and so handsome an object to leave lying
black fought black and white fought white around for the family or one’s visitors to
Sediba skeleton by and where miners burrowed into the hills, browse.
Marina Elliott smashing stalagmites and stalactites – and
fossils - for the limestone that helped build By the way, Vincent Carruthers is the
Johannesburg and Pretoria. author of the 1990 best-selling The
written on cavern walls which sometimes Magaliesberg which is still in print after
gleam with fossilised bones. Cradle of Life is a gem of modern publishing almost 30 years.
CARRUTHERS This is the area that has, in recent years,
startled the world with new discoveries
ROCKS THE CRADLE leading to new insights into human
evolution. It has propelled many scientists
into worldwide fame beginning in the 1930s
when Robert Broom, a general practitioner
with an interest in fossils, used dynamite
in the Cradle - to the horror of scientists
- to blast away some rock to discover the
first adult skull of an ape man. His find,
and those that have followed in the Cradle,
stunned the crowd at the British Museum
who’d pinned their scientific careers on a
skull – a crude hoax as it turned out – the
Piltdown Skull which, for 40 years, led
them to believe the missing link was a big-
brained Englishman.
The Cradle is the happy hunting ground
for famous paleoanthropologists such as
professors Bob Brain, Phillip Tobias, Ron
Clarke and Lee Berger, and their students
who, in recent years, have turned the
study of the human evolution on its head.
If you’ve been a little confused about their Sediba skull by
recent finds (Australopithecus sediba Marina Elliott
and Homo naledi) here is a delightful
way to catch up with, possibly, the most
comprehensively illustrated exposition
available to the public. There’s an attractive landscape which, in my view, is not
only South Africa’s most interesting few square kilometres,
Part Three deals with the boisterous history
but, as a tourist’s ‘must see’, deserves higher ranking than
Egypt’s Pyramids, Peru’s Machu Picchu or Italy’s Ancient Rome.

Kyalami Estates • CONNECT • Issue 4 • 2019 51