Cradle of Humankind

Okay, I am late with this post, but I had such an insanely busy week at work last week that hopefully I can be forgiven if I ask nicely. The report that I posted about in the last entry turned out to be a genuine nightmare. It was in worse shape than I thought was even possible, and I spent pretty much every waking hour (both at work and at home) trying to punch and coax and finagle it into some semblance of a respectable report that would be useful to practitioners in the region. For the first time since I started work here, the days flew by -- I felt like I sat down, started to get into the groove, and then it was 5pm. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed late at the office, but Melissa and Sandeep didn't have any reason to stay, so obviously they wanted to go home at the regular time. So I got into the habit of emailing the report to myself with a note of what I was in the middle of doing, and then picking up right where I left off on my laptop at home for another few hours.

I didn't get everything done that I wanted to, which was really a shame because I felt like it was an opportunity for me to take a pretty crappy report and really mold it into a polished product. That was ambitious for one week, and I ended up sending a marked-up copy with all sorts of notes of "things I wish I had time to do, but didn't, but here are my thoughts so you know I at least didn't think this was acceptable." Priti, the deputy director of the organization and the program lawyer for the HIV/AIDS program, seemed fairly happy with what I sent her when I saw her at the staff meeting this morning. I think her words were, "What you gave me was awesome." And then she asked me to do the extra research I had noted needed to be done, but didn't have time to do last week... so in the end, I get a second chance to make some of the changes I wanted to make anyway. All's well that ends well.

Anyway, all of that is just to explain why I didn't write up my trip to the Cradle of Humankind, which I did last weekend, before now.

The Cradle of Humankind is a World Heritage Site about an hour northwest of Johannesburg. It's the site of some of the oldest archaeological discoveries of hominid fossils (some dating back 3.5 million years), as well as a lot of them. Sterkfontein Caves alone have produced more than 1/3 of all early hominid fossils ever discovered, including "Mrs. Ples," the most complete skull ever found of the 2.3-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus. The archaeologist who found the skull was convinced it was a woman's, because it was small, and as everyone knew in 1947, women have small brains. He declared that Mrs. Ples was his one true love and everything. As it turns out, further excavations uncovered a skeleton nearby, and upon examination it was determined that Mrs. Ples was actually an adolescent male. Oops. No one wants to change his/her name now, so she stays Mrs. Ples. They also discovered "Little Foot" at the Cradle of Humankind, which is a near-complete skeleton between 2.5 and 3.3 million years old. They think he might be a completely new Austrolapithecus species (or genus? I can't ever remember), but they're still working on getting the skeleton completely free from the Sterkfontein Caves.

The site where Little Foot lives.

So, we went into the Sterkfontein Caves. It was cool, although it was really just a cave. I got to touch a fossil, which was stuck in one of the rocks... otherwise, it was kind of just a cave. There were some fun parts where the passage got narrow and we had to crab-walk for a while, and there's an underground cave that no one knows how deep it goes.... apparently three students from Wits (the big university in Johannesburg) went in a few decades ago to try to measure how deep the lake is, and one of them got lost and ended up dying. The guide told it like a bad horror story ("a week later, they found his body, and a message was written in the sand... it said, "I love you, Mom" -- I mean, really?), but apparently it's true.

After we came out of the cave, we ended up in a little amphitheater type place, where we got a final talk from our tour guide. There was a sculpture of the archaeologist who discovered Mrs. Ples with the skull, and the guide told us that we could choose to rub either the guy's nose (for good luck) or his hand (for wisdom). The guide told us we could only rub one, because rubbing both would be greedy.

Only choose ONE!

 I chose luck. I figured that if you have good enough luck, you end up wise as well. Or something? Anyway, here's our whole road trip crew in the amphitheater:

From the back left: Kyle (Canadian law student, working at an NGO), Nomonde (South African law graduate, working at an NGO), Sandeep (housemate, fellow intern), Kat (American MPH student), Kyle (American law student, working at an NGO). From front left: Brittany (American MPH student), Jesse (American Masters student), Melissa (housemate, fellow intern) and me. We're a heavily legal/ex-pat crowd.

We wandered around the cave exit for a while. The scenery was beautiful, and it was so nice to be out of the city and breathing clean air for a change.

Nomonde and me

No smog! No buildings!

 Anyway, the Sterkfontein Caves aren't only one part of the Cradle of Humankind. The other part is Maropeng, which means "returning to the place of origin" in Setswana (one of the 11 official languages of South Africa).  Maropeng is the official visitor's center of the Cradle of Humankind, and it has a restaurant and a science/natural history museum, as well as an underground boat ride and a whole bunch of other kind of random stuff. So after we had had enough of the caves, we headed over to Maropeng.

Welcome to Maropeng.

We ate lunch at the Tumlus Restaurant. [Vocabulary lesson: tumulus -- an artificial hillock or mound (as over a grave); especially: an ancient grave.] I didn't know what "tumulus" meant when we were there, but now it seems a little creepy to have eaten in a restaurant named after an artificial grave. Still, the name is appropriate, if a little morbid.

After we ate, we went to find the infamous boat ride. We walked through this sort of cheesy exhibit about the "four elements," and then we got into this round boat that went through.... well, the four elements. I don't really know how else to explain it. First it was all icy, and then there was water, and then everything kind of melted into lava, and then ... I don't know, what's the other element? Air? I forget what they did for air. It was a little underwhelming, but we promptly forgot all about it, because as soon as you get off the boat, you step into this vortex thing -- it's just a hallway, really, but there's some weird thing happening that makes it feel like everything is spinning, and the exit at the other end spins around until it's sideways, and it is the coolest thing I've ever experienced. We were all too flipped out to take any pictures, but this is from the website:

That girl looks a lot calmer than we did -- we were all screaming and falling over, and then stumbling out, catching our breath, and running back in to do it again. I have no idea what it had to do with the origins of mankind, but it was fun!

The majority of Maropeng is sort of a science/hands-on museum about the development of humankind over time, what makes us special, and how we're all connected and we're all African, etc., etc. It was a little over the top for me. I kind of felt like the museum was trying really hard to sell me something I already believe in.

In any case, after we left the exhibit, we found ourselves outside again. We looked around at the sun setting and took another group photo, because that's what you do.

And we found a playground! It was the best playground ever. You can see it in the lower right-hand corner of the picture above. Sandeep and Nomonde went back to go on the boat ride again, and we played on the swing set and climbed on things. And then we decided to play "Snakes and Vines," which was basically life-size Chutes and Ladders. I had never played before, but basically you're trying to move from the lower left-hand square of a grid (number 1) to the upper left-hand square of the grid (number 64), and sometimes when you move onto a square, there's a ladder/vine which you can "climb" up the board.... but sometimes there's a chute/snake, which you slide back down back towards the start. So, all 9 of us decided to play. Well, 8 of us were on the board, and Jesse was the "game master" who spun on all our turns and told us how many spots to move forward.

I lost. Badly. But it was fun.

After Snakes and Vines, we all packed up and went back to Joburg.

So, other things have happened in the last week, but nothing all that interesting. Melissa and I went to the Market Theatre on Saturday night to see a show called !Aia - From Cave to Sky, which was a dance/drama sort of interpretive three-man piece about the experience of the San people (the "bushmen" -- the indigenous people of South Africa, even before the Bantu pastoralists moved into the area). A lot of it was completely over my head, but it was a cultural experience to be sure, and the two main performers were both incredibly talented.

It has gotten absolutely frigid this weekend. Miserably, horribly cold. It actually snowed in lots of places over the weekend, and some of the highways were shut down for a few days. A group of us are going into the Drakensberg Mountains this coming weekend, where it is going to be cold (people go snow hiking). We're taking a day trip into Lesotho, which is an independent country but is completely surrounded by South Africa on all sides. Then we'll do some hiking on Sunday... and everyone else is going to abseil, although I'm still deciding. Then the following weekend, I'm flying up to Dar es Salaam, the capital city of Tanzania, to see a friend of mine who I interned with in New York in 2009. I'm taking a day off from work, but even so, I'll only be there for 3 days. Still, I'm we'll be able to go to Zanzibar for one of the days. It's warm and beachy in Tanzania, so that will be a really nice change, weather-wise! I can't wait....!