SA set to rock humanity’s Cradle for second time as birthplace of culture

It may have taken a while — 100,000 years or so — but the world looks set to acknowledge SA as the birthplace of brainy humans.

Windswept caves still gathering seashells along the coast are where our ancestors first started acting strangely: they lay down their clubs and sticks to spend time decorating the walls and their bodies — distinctly human acts that signalled the dawn of human culture.

Ancient braai places and campsites of yesteryear have offered up enough clues — including ochre beads and spear tips — to warrant formal status as world heritage sites, according to a growing list of scientists for whom the archaeological evidence is overwhelming.

As SA celebrated Heritage Day on Thursday, it emerged that formal international protection of these earliest cultural sites is imminent.

“It’s on the tentative [Unesco] list,” confirmed Cradle of Humankind director Mags Pillay. “They’ve compiled a dossier and all of that.”

SA already has several world heritage sites where archaeologists have found some of the oldest evidence of human evolution — fossilised bones up to 4.5 million years old — but human behaviour only started far more recently, possibly inspired by the Cape’s Eden-like conditions and rich seafood.

Now heritage bosses and scientists want to link the new cultural sites, mostly along the coast, to create a heritage tour that would be a potentially massive international tourism drawcard.

By pooling their resources, heritage organisations believe they can not only boost tourism but help fill the gaps in human history by generating revenue for further exploration of SA’s archaeological treasures.

Archaeologists are still discovering new sites, or new sections at known sites, among them the Pinnacle Point and Blombos Cave sites of the southern Cape. The area was once dubbed the “African Eden” due to the rich marine environment and wide coastal plain that existed when the sea level was lower, conditions that may have been the catalyst for human cultural ingenuity.

Another archaeological site on the Unesco tentative list — and which would potentially form part of the national heritage tour — is Sibhudu Cave in KwaZulu-Natal.

Fossils aside, SA boasts several other important old cultural sites of potential interest to tourists, such as Mapungubwe in Limpopo, the seat of the largest kingdom in the subcontinent until it was abandoned in the 14th century.

The plan is to add more cultural sites to the list currently before Unesco, said Dr Mariagrazia Galimberti, who heads the Cradle of Human Culture project in the Western Cape department of cultural affairs and sport.

“The idea is that in Gauteng you can see the physical evolution of humans, and when you get to the Western Cape you get the evolution of behaviourally modern humans,” she said.

The national heritage vision has prompted collaboration between officials in Johannesburg and Cape Town, with plans afoot to combine all heritage tours under the “Cradle” banner — Cradle of Humankind inland, and Cradle of Human Culture at the coast.

Cradle of Humankind director Michael Worsnip said the original idea was for heritage organisations to rally together to promote a central message famously articulated by renowned palaeoanthropologist Phillip Tobias, who helped put the Sterkfontein caves on the world map.

“Tobias said Africa gave the world humanity,” said Worsnip. “That is not a small thing. Africa gave the world its first human culture.”

Curtis Marean, a world-renowned scientist linked to the Pinnacle Point site, said he had helped initiate the Unesco nomination process in 2011. “We invited the SA World Heritage Committee to Mossel Bay for a meeting and made the case. It grew to include the other sites. So it has been a long process.

“One of the great scientific triumphs of the last 50 years is the unarguable conclusion that modern humans evolved in Africa, and then Africans left Africa and spread through Eurasia in a great diaspora,” he said.