Sterkfontein

Close to Johannesburg is the "Cradle of Humankind", a World Heritage site - an area laced with underground caverns where thousands of fossil fragments of our earliest ancestors are still being dug up. Sterkfontein is one of the caves open to visitors, and the home of Little Foot, who fell down a hole into the cave while being pursued by a leopard - 3.3 million years ago (we know, or surmise, that he was being pursued by a leopard because the leopard's skeleton is right next to him - they both broke their necks in the fall). Little Foot was discovered in 1997 and the site is still being excavated. Little Foot is an australopithecene early hominin - one of a large number of "missing links" which branched off from the ponginae (today's orangutans) and the apes (today's gorillas and chimps) some six million years ago.

The Sterkfontein cave is nothing special in terms of stalacmites and tites - a lot of these were destroyed by lime miners during the gold rush days - but the whole area is very suggestive, and the museum attached to the cave is excellent - the clearest explanation of our evolutionary history that I've ever seen. What comes across very clearly is that human beings (or homo sapiens sapiens) is just one remaining branch of a fairly wide tree of hominid/human variations - all of our closest cousins are now extinct (including robustus, who had massive jaws to work through a heavy diet of vegetation - just think, if robustus had won the evolutionary race we'd all now be natural vegetarians with no conception at all of steak or hamburgers). Modern humans coexisted with some of these cousins - at some point about 200,000 years ago an ancestor identical to ourselves might have bumped into Neanderthal man, or homo heidelburgensis - but wouldn't have met Little Foot, who'd become extinct some two million years earlier. The timescales are incredible - the civilisations that we know about only go back some 9,000 years - what were human beings DOING for the other 191,000 years? Well, like Little Foot, they were probably mostly running away from leopards etc. Palaeontologist Bob Brain is very clear on this: "far from being mighty hunters, the early hominids formed an insignificant part of the fauna of the time and the were certainly subservient to carnivores such as leopards and sabre-tooth cats. They were the hunted, rather than the hunters".

All of this is a pretty strong argument against any anthropomorphic or creationist view of the world; God's image clearly has nothing to do with it, we're a lucky survivor from a very wide range of evolutionary experiments. If Little Foot had been able to run a bit faster, we could well all now be about three feet tall with a thick coat of fur.

A footnote: incredibly, research in the Sterkfontein area came to a halt under apartheid - the Nationalist government was extremely religious, and of course firmly believed in white supremacy, and so a line of enquiry which had begun to locate a common ancestor for all humankind in South Africa (and pretty certainly black, to boot, or at least not palely "European") was discouraged - all government funding was stopped.