Cradle of Humankind
— — the limestone the human story rose out of.
Not only on a wall.
“A 47,000-hectare belt of dolomitic limestone country northwest of Johannesburg, threaded with caves where early hominin fossils have been excavated for more than seventy years. Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai lie within an hour of each other. The Maropeng visitor centre anchors the southern edge. The veld is dry and pale in winter and green after the summer thunderstorms.
Cradle of Humankind, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Cradle of Humankind occupies about 47,000 hectares of dolomitic limestone country in Gauteng and North West provinces, roughly 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg. The area was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999 and extended in 2005 to include the Makapan Valley and Taung Skull fossil sites. Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai, and a dozen other fossil-bearing caves lie within it. The Maropeng visitor centre at the southern edge has anchored public access to the site since it opened in 2005 on the R563.
The caves formed in Precambrian dolomitic limestone laid down between 2.5 and 2.3 billion years ago, slowly dissolved by groundwater into the chambers and shafts where hominin remains were preserved. Sterkfontein alone has produced more than a third of the early hominin fossils ever found. Mrs. Ples, an Australopithecus africanus skull, was excavated by Robert Broom in 1947. Little Foot, a near-complete skeleton recovered from Sterkfontein over more than two decades, was dated in 2015 to roughly 3.67 million years ago.
Maropeng and the adjacent Sterkfontein Caves are open daily except 25 December, with last cave tours typically leaving by 4 p.m. The Maropeng exhibition includes a short underground boat ride through the elements that shaped life on Earth and a long gallery on human origins. Sterkfontein tours descend about sixty metres into the cave system and run roughly every half hour. Both sites lie about an hour from central Johannesburg and Pretoria by road, west of Lanseria airport on the R563.