Scientists have discovered the oldest home in human history and it was in a cave. Located in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert is the Wonderwerk Cave and that’s where ancient humans made their home around two million years ago. While the inhabitants of the cave weren’t modern humans, the researchers believe that they were probably
australopithecines or
Homo Habilis.
It was a team of geologists and archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) and the University of Toronto who made this discovery. Incredibly, the cave was used as a home for several millions of years throughout history. What’s even more amazing is that they found evidence of the earliest use of fire and hand axes in a “cave context”.
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Few sites in the world preserve a continuous archaeological record spanning millions of years. Wonderwerk Cave, located in South Africa s Kalahari Desert, is one of those rare sites. Meaning miracle in Afrikaans, Wonderwerk Cave has been identified as potentially the earliest cave occupation in the world and the site of some of the earliest indications of fire use and tool making among prehistoric humans.
New research, published in
Quaternary Science Reviews, led by a team of geologists and archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) and the University of Toronto, confirms the record-breaking date of this spectacular site. We can now say with confidence that our human ancestors were making simple Oldowan stone tools inside the Wonderwerk Cave 1.8 million years ago. Wonderwerk is unique among ancient Oldowan sites, a tool-type first found 2.6 million years ago in East Africa, precisely because it is a cave and not an open-air occurrence, explained
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