![]() ![]() The Cradle of Humankind, which lies about 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg in South Africa, is a World Heritage Site made up of complex fossil-bearing caves. ![]() “Now we can link together the findings from separate caves and create a better picture of evolutionary history in southern Africa.” The results revealed that the fossils in date to six narrow windows of time between 3.2 million and 1.3 million years ago. “Unlike previous dating work, which often focused on one cave, sometimes even just one chamber of the cave,” says Pickering, “we are providing direct ages for eight caves and a model to explain the age of all the fossils from the entire region. It proposes that fossils in the region date to just six specific time periods. The research, published in the journal Nature, addresses assumptions that the fossil-rich caves of the Cradle could not be related to each other chronologically. It also sheds light on the type of climate that our early ancestors lived in and how this changed in the past. New research from an international team of scientists led by Dr Robyn Pickering, an isotope geochemist at UCT, is the first to provide a timeline for fossils from the caves in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind – the world’s richest site for fossils of our human ancestors.
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