A new study shows the Rock deposits in a cave system inhabited by early human ancestors in South Africa may be almost two million years younger than previously thought, this new information may cause some doubts if whether Humankind may have originated in the country.
The study, which used sediment analysis, paleo-magnetism and uranium-lead dating, found deposits at Bolt’s Farm in the Cradle of Humankind about 50km north-west of Johannesburg to be between 2.27 and 1.7 million years old.
The University of Cape Town said in a statement on Wednesday, the earlier research, which dated deposits in a small cave called Waypoint 160 at Bolt’s Farm at about 4,5 million years.
Bolt’s Farm is a cave system located in the World Heritage site and is an important source of fossils of various species of Plio-Pleistocene fauna, including primates and big cats. It is also home to a novel rat species, Euryotomys bolti, found nowhere else.
According to the statement, the earlier research that dated Waypoint 160 deposits relied on fossilised remains of the rat to compare it to other fossil sites in South Africa.
“It is becoming increasingly unlikely that Sterkfontein is as old as claimed,” Robyn Pickering said.
The findings of the study led by Edwards debunk assumptions that sites like Sterkfointen Caves preserve deposits and fossils older than 3.2 million years, according to Pickering.
Tara Edward, a Human Evolution Research Institute, a postdoctoral research fellow from the university’s Department of geological sciences and lead author of the paper published in Science Direct said, “All of our work using multidisciplinary sources over the last few years show no evidence for any sites in the Cradle older than 3.2 million years ago.”
