A ninety minute drive north-west from Johannesburg takes you to the beautiful Magaliesberg Mountains. One of the special places to visit is the World Heritage Site: The Cradle of Humankind and the Wonder Caves.
The greater Magaliesberg area offers fantastic hiking trails with views of superb rock formations, sparkling waterfalls, winding streams and masses of exceptional indigenous vegetation.
The "Cradle fo Humankind" site lies mainly in the Gauteng province with a small extension into the neighbouring North West Province and covers 47 000 hectares of mostly privately owned land. It comprises a strip of a dozen dolomitic limestone caves containing the fossillised remains of ancient forms of animals, plants and most importantly, hominids. The dolomite in which the caves formed, started out as coral reefs growing in a warm shallow sea about 2.3 billion years ago. It now offers an extraordinary display of live stalagmites and stalactites.
As the reefs died off, they were transformed into limstone which some time later was converted into dolomite. Millions of years later - after the sea had receded - slightly accidic groundwater began to dissolve out calcium carbonate from the dolomite to form underground caverns. Over time, the water table dropped and the underground caverns were exposed to the air. The percolation of the acidic water through the dolomite also dissolved the calcium carbonates out of the rock into the caves and formed the stalactites, stalagmites and other chrystaline structures. Continued erosion on the earth's surface and dissolution of the dolomite eventually resulted in shafts forming between the surface of the earth and the caves below.
Bones, stones and plants washed down these shafts into the caves; animals and hominids fell into caves, coudln't get out and died. All these remains became fossilized and along with stones and pebbles, became cemented into a hard mixture called breccia.
At least 7 of the 12 sites have yielded hominid remains. In total, over 850 hominid fossils were found and as such, Cradle of Humankind represents one of the world's richest concentrations of hominid fossil bearing sites. The scientific value of this area lies in the fact that these sites provide us with a window into the past, to a time when our earliest ancestors were eveolving and changing. Scientists have long accepted that all humans have their origin in Africa and sites like this enable scientists to understand how these hominids have changed and diversified since then
