Heritage Day

September 24 is Heritage Day in South Africa and South Africans have an annual opportunity to think about diverse cultures and their heritage. My clever cousin chose a special way to celebrate. 

We drove to a new museum, named Cradle of Humankind, where the story of human evolution is retold in an impressive collection of exhibits which benefits from modern technology and innovation in a way that old museums cannot. The context is perfect. Close by, the Rising Star Cave was the location of exciting and rich fossil discoveries in 2013 which led to the detailed description of 'homo naledi', a branch of the family that evolved in the area millions of years ago.

The most amazing discovery in this cave is that 15 different individuals ended up in the same cave and it is surmised that it is a burial chamber. Long before 'homo sapiens' appeared, this branch of the family seems to have had rituals surrounding death. It is likely that these remote indirect ancestors, while still good tree climbers, had a consciousness about life and death that resembles our own.

The limestone caves all over Southern Africa have revealed many long hidden treasures and have been a main player in leading paleontology to the current robust theory that 'homo sapiens', our direct ancestor, first stood and walked in this part of the globe and gave rise to all modern peoples. There were many other branches of the family that were born but died out. 'Homo erectus' for example, developed outside of Africa and spread far and wide, including back to Africa. However, 'homo sapiens' won the war of survival and came to dominate the planet, for better and worse. So, we are truly all African and it always feels like home to me. 

We also descended deep into the Sterkfontein Cave close by, where Dr. Broom, in 1948, discovered the remains of 'Mrs. Ples', first thought to be the skull of a woman. Advances since then in science and knowledge have led to the likelihood that it is the skull of a 14 year old boy! The humanlike remains in this cave all ended up there by misfortune, either falling in or being dragged in by predators that had killed them. It was not an ancient dwelling place.

The new museum has one exhibit where the visitor walks the timeline from the present day back to the beginning of the earth and marks the five mass extinctions that we now know about. The most cataclysmic mass extinction, a mere 251 million years ago, destroyed over 90% of all life on the planet. Will the sixth mass extinction, currently underway,  created by climate change and our profligate abuse of the earth's resources, be of that dimension?