Nahoon Point

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View from the quayside in East London to Nahoon Point (far right)

The Nahoon Point (literally "Nahoon Peak") is a headland in South Africa on the Indian Ocean in the eastern city of East London . It is a lookout point, a geological outcrop and an important paleoanthropological and paleontological site . The sanctuary is called Nahoon Point Nature Reserve .

Geography and geology

The headland is enclosed in the east by Nahoon Beach and in the west by the area of ​​Bat's Cave (bat cave). It is located about 1200 meters (as the crow flies) south of the confluence of the Nahoon River in the Indian Ocean. The eroded slopes slope down towards the coast. A country road leads from the north. For visitors, wooden walkways were built on the slopes , which help to protect the sensitive natural area.

The rock of the headland originating from the younger Pleistocene is a calcareous sandstone ( dune sandstone ) with deposits of pebbles . It forms the hanging wall over Karoo - dolerites . The sediment zone of Pleistocene rock and recent sand dunes extends from East London along the coast in a north-easterly direction to the mouth of the Kwelera River . Their length is about 18 kilometers. Its maximum width, i.e. the extent from the coastline to the inland, is about two kilometers.

Site

A well-known palaeontological site is located in the area at Nahoon Point. Here the dune sand solidified to a sandstone during the Pleistocene. Footprints of mammals (hyena), other animals and prehistoric humans ( Homo sapiens ) were found in a stratum of the rock . The age of the human footprints was examined with different measuring methods and different values ​​were determined. The age of the finds has long been the subject of controversy. The following measurement methods yielded the values: with radiocarbon dating (1966) about 29,000 years, with the infrared stimulated thermoluminescence method (1999) about 144,000 years and with thermoluminescence dating (1999) about 236,000 years. The optically induced luminescence method (2009) determined an age of around 124,000 years.

Prepared finds from this sandstone, which clearly show the human footprints, are on display in the East London Museum . The prints were discovered in 1964 by R. Kaiser and W. Hartley in the Aeolian sediments of the Nahoon Formation . The first age determinations with the help of the radiocarbon method were made at what was then the University College of Rhodesia in Salisbury . Their results were published in 1966 by archaeologist Hilary Deacon from the Albany Museum in Grahamstown .

Simple tools used by early humans from the early Stone Age period have been found in several locations around East London. Finds of the "sandpipers" are known from the coastal dunes in the urban area.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nahoon Point Nature Reserve, short description ( Memento of the original from May 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.spf.org.za
  2. ↑ PD Morant (Ed.) Et al .: Estuaries of the Cape. Part II Synopses of available information on individual systems . (CSIR Research Report No. 441). Stellenbosch 1993, plate 2 / page 9 (English; PDF; 12.2 MB)
  3. ^ Jacobs Zenobia, David L. Roberts: Last Interglacial Age for aeolian and marine deposits and the Nahoon fossil human footprints, Southeast Coast of South Africa . In: Quaternary Geochronology, Vol. 4 (2009), Issue 2, pp. 160-169, doi : 10.1016 / j.quageo.2008.09.002 .
  4. ↑ Catalog of Fossil Hominids Database on www.fossil.kochi-tech.ac.jp ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / fossil.kochi-tech.ac.jp
  5. ^ Colin A. Lewis: Radiocarbon dates and the Late Quaternary palaeogeography of the Province of the Eastern Cape, South Africa .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English; PDF; 669 kB)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / eprints.ru.ac.za  
  6. ↑ PD Morant (Ed.) Et al .: Estuaries of the Cape. Part II Synopses of available information on individual systems . (CSIR Research Report No. 441). Stellenbosch 1993, p. 5 (English; PDF; 12.2 MB)

Coordinates: 32 ° 59 ′ 49.23 "  S , 27 ° 57 ′ 2.94"  E