The full title of the vault is ‘The Philip V Tobias primate and hominid fossil laboratory’. It is a mecca for scientists from around the world. It is housed in the Evolutionary Studies Institute (formally the Bernard Price Institute) of the University of the Witwatersrand. Our outstanding guide for the day was Dr Bernard Zipfel, the curator of rock and fossil collections at the university. 

 

We were greeted in the foyer of the institute with a taste of what was yet to come with the introduction of a complete fossilised Massospondylus carinatus. This was an early sauropodomorph found in the Golden Gate area and dated to180 mya. It was a creature with powerful hind legs and small forelimbs, a long neck and tail and a very small head. 

 

Moving along through the well organised security arrangements, we entered the vault proper, which was opened in 2013. Up to 2008 the previous laboratory had been a repository for a few fossil bones and teeth, but since then there has been a great increase in discoveries of hominid fossils. They now almost fill the new vault to capacity.

 

What a privilege to be shown the original of the ‘Taung child’, the 2.3-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus, discovered by Raymond Dart in 1924, and now to be seen in a brightly lit display case. A far cry from the tale of this little skull being lost on the back seat of a London taxi. Bernard explained the hypothesis of Lee Burger and Ron Clark that this creature had been preyed upon by an eagle. Eagles are known to take monkeys, and the damage marks on monkey skulls caught by eagles resemble those seen on the Taung child. Bernard also went on to explain the role that Dart’s discovery eventually played in uncovering fraudulent claims about Piltdown Man’s place in human evolution.

 

We moved on to Australopithecus sediba. The first specimen came to light after a right clavicle (collarbone) was discovered by Matthew Berger, the 9-year-old son of Lee Berger, in Malapa, South Africa. in August 2008. Subsequent excavations in the cave deposits uncovered two partial skeletons, a youth and an adult female dated at 1.89 mya. These two were found close together and it is likely that they died about the same time and were entombed in sediment.

 

Then we came to Homo naledi. This is an extinct species of archaic human discovered in 2013 through careful excavation of the Dinaledi chamber in the Rising Star cave system in the Cradle of Humankind. The chamber has yielded 3,200 individual fossils, making up about 15 different individuals of various ages. One collection of these fragments has been laid out to create a composite individual for viewers to marvel over. The fossil samples have been dated to between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago, the Middle Pleistocene era.

 

 

Access to the Rising Star chamber, where all these fossils were found, is extremely difficult, and explorer archaeologists have to be small of stature and gracile of build just to enter the cave. They certainly cannot suffer from claustrophobia. All the evidence from the fossils themselves and their position in the cave system point towards the conclusion that they were ritually buried there, which raises many more questions than just ‘How can this be?’

 

We were shown samples of the fossilised Australopithecus robustus with its large head, pronounced cranial ridge, big teeth and huge jaw bone. What was in its diet that required such substantial chewing machinery? 

 

 

Finally, we came to ‘Little Foot’, the nickname of an almost complete Australopithecus skeleton found by Professor Ron Clark in Sterkfontein Member Two between 1994 and 1998. Dating this ancient find has proven problematic, with dates between 2.2 and 3.5 million years ago being offered. Likewise, its taxonomic placement is disputed.  I particularly felt it was a great privilege to be standing next to so ancient a skeleton, almost complete and so well curated. 

 

Report by Bill Murray