sites north of Johannesburg. “+” signs represent Homo and later cave sites. Langebaan is an open-air site that has provided a rich source of mammalian fauna for the late Miocene. It has been used to aid faunal dating of Makapansgat and other Australopithecine sites.

The Australopithecine caves of South Africa formed in Proterozoic dolomites and, in addition to the usual clastic infill, originally contained massive amounts of pure speleothems in the form of stalagmites and flowstones. In the early part of the 1900s these speleothems were mined for gold extraction in the Witwatersrand goldfields around Johannesburg and Pretoria. The Australopithecine fossils turned up with the speleothems and with the unwanted breccias. Among the hominid finds was the skull, “Mrs Ples”, at Sterkfontein, blasted out of a flowstone in two pieces. Robert Broom, who came to be in charge of the acquired site, assigned it to Plesianthropus transvaalensis. Later, Robinson reassigned it to Australopithecus. Sterkfontein has turned out to be a rich site: the latest find, by Ron Clarke and Nkwane Molefe, being an almost complete skeleton known as “Little Foot” from the Silberberg Grotto near the bottom of a shaft inside the cave (Clarke, 1998). By magnetostratigraphy, the skeleton is currently assigned an age of between 3.30 and 3.33 Ma BP (Partridge et al., 1999).