Time-travelling in the Cape

There are one million years of archaeology here, says Professor John Parkington of the UCT Archaeology department, pointing to shell middens along the coastlines and metres-deep evidence of human habitation in mountain caves. But most remarkable of all is the fact that the very origin of our species is written on the rock walls of the Cederberg.

For while archaeological sites further up the continent contain examples of our ancestors, and possibly the mythical “missing link” between us and the apes, it’s in the Western Cape that we find the first examples of homo sapiens, our species or literally "people like us".