Wonderwerk Cave, located in the Kuruman Hills between Danielskuil and Kuruman in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa, is an archaeological site of immense significance. Formed as an ancient solution cavity in dolomite rocks, it is a National Heritage Site managed as a satellite of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley. The site runs horizontally for about 140 m (460 ft) into the base of a hill.
Few archaeological sites possess a continuous record spanning millions of years. Wonderwerk Cave, situated in South Africa's Kalahari Desert, stands as one of these exceptional locations. Archaeological research at this massive cave site has revealed an immensely long record of human and environmental history spanning hundreds of thousands of years.
The cave and its surroundings form a conservation area with several features distinctive of the Kuruman Hills. Accumulated deposits inside the cave, up to 7 m (23 ft) in-depth, reflect natural sedimentation processes such as water and wind deposition as well as the activities of animals, birds, and human ancestors over some 2 million years.
Location of Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.
Discovery and Excavation
Though humans occupied the cave continuously over the last 2 million years, it was not discovered by modern humans until farmers came upon it the 1940s. Major damage was caused in the 1940s when local farmers dug up large parts of the cave interior to bag and sell organic-rich material as fertiliser. This comprised stratified archaeological deposits containing artifacts, bone and other material that would have been crucial to an understanding of the cultural and palaeoenvironmental history of the site.
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Subsequently a series of brief archaeological excavations began. The initial archaeological studies of the 1940s, were followed up briefly in the 1970s. Peter Beaumont of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley then carried out major excavations at the site between 1978 and 1993, with Anne Thackeray and Francis Thackeray working at the site in 1979, excavating and researching the Later Stone Age levels from cultural and archaeozoological perspectives respectively. Work led by Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto, Liora Kolska Horwitz of The Hebrew University and Francesco Berna of Simon Fraser University, in collaboration with the McGregor Museum (where excavated assemblages are housed), was carried out from around 2008.
A digital model of the site was created by laser scanning, forming part of the Zamani Project. Key team members who have worked on the dating of the lower units are the late Hagai Ron (magnetostratigraphic or palaeomagnetic dating), Ari Matmon (cosmogenic isotope dating), Robyn Pickering (U/Pb dating) and Naomi Porat (Optically stimulated luminescence dating).
Evidence of Early Human Occupation
Wonderwerk Cave Secrets 🕯️ Oldest Human Home & Fire Ever Found!
Excavations at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert have led researchers to determine that a cave held human occupants as long as two million years ago, making it the world’s oldest home. This is the earliest evidence for intentional cave occupation by human ancestors.
Inside the 456-foot-long (139-meter) cavity, signs of ancient fires suggest people cooked food here about a million years ago. A 2012 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported the first evidence of early humans using fire, some one million years ago. The team were able to successfully establish the shift from Oldowan tools (mainly sharp flakes and chopping tools) to early handaxes over 1 million years ago, and to date the deliberate use of fire by our prehistoric ancestors to 1 million years ago, in a layer deep inside the cave.
Buried deep in the rock, archeologists and scientists found the ashy, burnt remains of grasses, leaves, and animal bones. The latter is a particularly significant because other examples of early fire use come from open-air sites where the possible role of wildfires cannot be excluded. Moreover, Wonderwerk contained a full array of fire remnants: burnt bone, sediment and tools as well as the presence of ash.
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A hand axe from Wonderwerk Cave, seen in front of the cave entrance.
The cave also contains ancient stone tools such as hand axes. "We can now say with confidence that our human ancestors were making simple Oldowan stone tools inside the Wonderwerk Cave 1.8 million years ago.
As with other archaeological projects in the area, the Wonderwerk Cave Research Project says it also has a duty to respect the cave’s spiritual significance to ancestral and contemporary residents of the area. Indications of the cave's contemporary social or ritual significance relate inter alia to the occasional collecting of water, by local African people, for healing purposes. Aspects of the use of the cave's deep interior reaches are also being considered in these terms.
Dating Methods
Dating cave deposits is one of the greatest challenges in paleo-anthropology, aka the study of human evolution. To overcome this challenge, the team analyzed a 2.5-meter thick sedimentary layer that contained stone tools, animal remains and fire remnants using two methods: paleomagnetism and burial dating.
In April 2021, archaeologists announced the results of magnetostratigraphy and cosmogenic dating of the cave. Using magnetostratigraphy, a branch of stratigraphy that detects variations in the magnetic properties of rocks, the researchers dated 178 samples from the cave. The findings dated some of the sediment to 2 million years old. That matched the results that study team member Michael Chazan reached using cosmogenic dating in 2008.
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Magnetization occurred when clay particles, that entered the cave from outside, settled on the prehistoric cave floor, thereby preserving the direction of the earth's magnetic field at that time. "Our lab analysis showed that some of the samples were magnetized to the south instead of the north, which is the direction of today's magnetic field.
Ari Matmon, Director of HU's the Institute of Earth Sciences, used a secondary dating method to further confirm when the earliest human ancestors may have occupied the site. "Quartz particles in sand have a built-in geological clock that starts ticking when they enter a cave.
Significance of Wonderwerk Cave
The dating of prehistoric human activity at Wonderwerk Cave has far-reaching implications. The co-directors of the Wonderwerk Cave project, Prof. Michael Chazan at the University of Toronto and Liora Kolska Horwitz at HU's National Natural History Collections, explained that the findings at Wonderwerk "are an important step towards understanding the tempo of human evolution across the African continent.
Wonderwerk is “a key site for the Earlier Stone Age,” according to the paper. The team were able to successfully establish the shift from Oldowan tools (mainly sharp flakes and chopping tools) to early handaxes over 1 million years ago, and to date the deliberate use of fire by our prehistoric ancestors to 1 million years ago, in a layer deep inside the cave.
Wonderwerk Cave, within a servitude ceded to the McGregor Museum, was declared a National Monument of South Africa in 1993. It was opened to the public, as a site museum, in 1993. In the same year a major graffiti-removal project was carried out. In 2000 new legislation made the site a Provincial Heritage Site. Between 2003 and 2009 it was assessed in terms of the grading system prescribed by the National Heritage Resources Act and graded as a Grade I site (i.e.: of national significance).
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