Gladysvale cave
| Gladysvale cave
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 Excavations in front of the cave entrance |
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| Location: | Province Gauteng | |
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Geographic location: |
25 ° 54 ′ 0 ″ S , 27 ° 45 ′ 0 ″ E | |
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| Particularities: | Fossil site | |
The Gladysvale Cave is a Pleistocene fossil site in the Gauteng Province ( South Africa ), approximately 13 kilometers east of Sterkfontein , Kromdraai and Swartkrans and approximately 45 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg . It belongs to the Uitkomst farm and is located in the middle of the John Nash Nature Reserve in a larger protected area designated as the Cradle of Humankind . The fossils come from soil layers of different ages, which were initially thought to be between 1.7 and 2.5 million years old. Later analyzes showed that there are also younger deposits.
The fossil deposit was created in a three- chamber cave system that had formed in a silica- rich dolomite deposit. It had been known as a fossil site since the mid-1930s and was occasionally visited by paleoanthropologists .
After Lee Berger began systematic excavations in 1991, several teeth were discovered here that were ascribed to Australopithecus africanus and are believed to be around 2.4 to 2 million years old: on April 5, 1992, a third left premolar (archive number GVH -1) and on April 12, 1992 a second right molar (GVH-2). Furthermore, after the recovery of thousands of fossil animal bones, several dozen animal species were found, which were also used to determine the age of the deposit; Among these species were relatives of the hyenas , the dogs and the big cats , numerous horned bearers (Bovidae) and species of the pigs (Suidae), horses , elephants and small mammals . Several non- hominine primates have also been discovered, including monkey relatives and baboons .
Among the discovered in younger strata Fund finds including a dated to an age of 780,000 years include hand ax and finger bones of a 600,000-year-old individual of the genus Homo .
The name of the cave goes back to Gladys Norton, whose family held the mining rights on this Gladysvale site at the beginning of the 20th century .
Norton family (around 1920) with Gladys in the center
Surroundings of the cave
Visitor access to the excavation site
Fossil hyena
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Individual evidence
- ↑ Lee Berger , André W. Keyser, Phillip Tobias : Gladysvale: First early hominid site discovered in South Africa since 1948. In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Volume 92, 1993, pp. 107–111, doi : 10.1002 / ajpa.1330920109 , full text (PDF; 2.2 MB)
- ↑ Robyn Pickering: Stratigraphy, U-Th chronology, and paleoenvironments at Gladysvale Cave: insights into the climatic control of South African hominin-bearing cave deposits. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 53, No. 5, 2007, pp. 602-619, doi : 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2007.02.005
- ^ Grant Hall et al .: An Acheulean handaxe from the Gladysvale Cave Site in the Witwatersrand region of South Africa. In: South African Journal of Science. Volume 102, 2006, pp. 103-105, full text (PDF; 820 kB)
- ↑ Peter Schmid, Lee Berger: Middle Pleistocene hominid carpal proximal phalanx from the Gladysvale site, South Africa. In: South African Journal of Science. Volume 93, No. 10, 1997, pp. 411-430, full text (PDF; 116 kB)
