South Africa

South Africa, Maverick Life

Global citizen scientists dig it: unearthing SA’s paleo tourism

A reconstructed skull. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

6 Nov 2024

All kitted out in bush gear, tourists head out on an African safari. But this one isn’t about spotting animals. It involves searching for fossil evidence of life millions of years ago.

“Imagine,” says Paula, as she carefully digs around a piece of bone that juts out of the earth, “just imagine if I find that one fossil that is the missing piece in a great big human ancestor puzzle.”

Paula, who is from Ireland, is at the bottom of an excavation pit in the Cradle of Humankind Unesco World Heritage Site near Johannesburg in Gauteng, where about 40% of Africa’s human ancestor fossils have been found. She’s part of a group of six international tourists on a paleo safari.

Odyssey of discovery

The group are guests of Ancient Odysseys, a US-based travel company that offers people the chance to get in touch with their inner Indiana Jones, as they put it, and participate in scientific digs and excavations around the world.

Ancient Odysseys offers dinosaur and fossil hunting in Australia and the US, and excavating for lost civilisations at Hadrian’s Wall in England. It’s a win-win for both research projects and guests, explains founder and chief executive Marisa Rodriguez. The money paid by guests helps the projects, which are often not properly resourced, and the guests get to work alongside the real experts in the field. On this trip, she says, a portion of the funds goes to GENUS Paleosciences, an organisation that provides bursaries for palaeontological research in South Africa and will contribute to training black female scientists in the paleo field.

This is Ancient Odysseys’ first South African tour and despite the inevitable heat and dust of an African summer’s afternoon, the Kromdraai excavation site at the Cradle is buzzing with people and excitement.

Mammal fossils. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

Lab work in progress. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

Professor José Braga (left) and Ruy Fernandez. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

“This is like getting into a time machine every day that goes back more than two million years,” says Professor José Braga, director of archaeological excavations here, who is covered in dust and sporting a leather hat. He adjusts the laser theodolite, a machine that records the locations of recent finds, before climbing down into the pit.

Braga, who has been working here since 1995, is also a professor in Toulouse, France, and specialises in “filling in gaps in the fossil records of both Australopithecus ancestors and their cousins Paranthropus”.

Along with Braga is a team of scientists from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, their students and assistants, and the paleo safari group.

Under the guidance of the research team, the group participates in excavating, retrieving fossils, sampling and sieving sediment. It’s hot and dirty work – manicures will be destroyed in seconds – but there is a palpable spirit of inquiry, which rises to a fever pitch as Braga and his student Ruy Fernandez, a geologist from Toulouse, unearth a chunk of rock containing something of possible significance.

The Ancient Odysseys group are themselves an impressive bunch – professors, engineers and academics – and are clearly having the time of their lives. There is a steady stream of high-powered chatting as the scientists share their expertise and the paleo safari group makes comments and asks questions about how, as South African anthropologist Robert Ardrey said, “humanity evolved beneath the canopy of the African skies on the immense card table of the African savannah”.

There is also a moment of great mirth when Paula tucks an oxtail bone from the previous night’s dinner in the earth where Braga is excavating and hides herself behind an acacia tree to video his reaction. For a split second the professor looks entirely disconcerted, but then Paula starts shrieking with laughter and gives the game away.

Visiting the ancestors

The 13-day paleo safari involves many days of field work, but the group, coincidentally all women, also get to enjoy a luxury weekend in the bush with game viewing, wildlife encounters, delicious food and a hot air balloon ride.

For most of the paleo safari group, this is their first visit to South Africa and a long-held dream to visit a place like the Cradle of Humankind.

We meet up again a few days later for a true once-in-a-lifetime treat – a visit to the Fossil Primate and Hominid Vault at the Evolutionary Studies Institute, which houses the largest collection of fossil hominid remains in the world. With more than 3,500 individual fossils, the vault is a mecca for scientists from around the world.

Excavations in progress. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

A skeleton of Homo naledi. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

Professor of comparative paleobiology Jonah Choiniere explains the complexity of excavating dinosaur fossils while showing us the enthralling collection. The fossils and the rocks containing them are encased in plaster of Paris, and it can take up to a decade to excavate them in the lab.

He holds up, with some difficulty, a single dinosaur vertebra – which gives us all shivers at the thought of just how huge these dinosaurs were. We also get to see two 190-million-year-old dinosaur embryos, out of a group of seven eggs, that have been identified as the world’s oldest dinosaur embryos found to date. Discovered in South Africa, they are also the oldest known embryos for any terrestrial vertebrate from anywhere in the world.

Karoo fossils

Ancient Odysseys is planning a therapsid (ancestors of mammals) fossil hunting expedition to the Karoo next year.

“We’ll reach back and rewind time to work with world-famous palaeontologists in the Karoo,” says Rodriguez, “to explore and excavate the fossilised remains of 420-million-year-old ancient fish and early four-legged tetrapods from the Devonian. We’ll also get hands-on with the fossils for which the Karoo is best known: mammal-like reptiles called therapsids, which are reptiles that show features of mammals and represent a transitional stage between reptiles and mammals.”

The Taung child skull. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

A reconstructed skull. (Photo: Bridget Hilton-Barber)

The Karoo is one of the most important fossil locales in the world.

More than 200 million years ago, South Africa formed part of the southern outreaches of Pangaea, and the Karoo contains a largely unbroken record of prehistoric life, extending from the Permian to the Jurassic period. The fossils there include the ancestors of lizards and snakes, tortoises, crocodiles and dinosaurs.

Dr Bernhard Zipfel, Wits University’s curator of fossil and rock collections, then leads us into the hominid fossil vault to meet some of the most significant fossils of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Taung child skull is the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus, which was discovered in 1924 by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in Taung, present-day North West, and described as a new species by Professor Raymond Dart in 1925.

We also meet the skeletal remains of Homo naledi, the single largest fossil hominin find yet made in Africa.

And for a moment, there is silence as we contemplate our complex emergence from a lineage of African apes. DM

For more information check out www.ancientodysseys.com

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

South Africa

Odyssey of discovery

Visiting the ancestors

Karoo fossils