''Plovers Lake Cave'' is a fossil-bearing breccia filled cavity in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

. The cave is located about 4 km Southeast of the well known South African

hominid The Hominidae (), whose members are known as the great apes or hominids (), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: '' Pongo'' (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); ''Gorilla'' (the east ...

-bearing sites of Sterkfontein and

Kromdraai Kromdraai Conservancy is a protected conservation park located to the south-west of Gauteng province in north-east South Africa. It is in the Muldersdrift area not far from Krugersdorp. Etymology Its name is derived from Afrikaans meaning "Cro ...

and about 36 km Northwest of the City of

Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Demo ...

. Plovers Lake has been declared a South African National Heritage Site.

History of investigations

Plovers Lake had two periods of excavation. One in the late 1980s and early 1990s by C.K. "Bob" Brain and Francis Thackeray of the then ''

Transvaal Museum The Ditsong National Museum of Natural History, formerly the Transvaal Museum, is a natural history museum situated in Pretoria, South Africa. It is located on Paul Kruger Street, between Visagie and Minnaar Streets, opposite the Pretoria City Ha ...

'' (now known as the Northern Flagship Institute) in what is known as the "Outer Deposits", and the second by Lee Berger of the

University of the Witwatersrand The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African Public university, public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( o ...

and Steve Churchill of

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

in 2000 – 2004 in the "Inner Deposits".

Recovered fossils

Many thousands of fossils were found by both teams. In the Outer Deposits, Brain and Thakeray discovered a very fine fossil

baboon Baboons are primates comprising the genus ''Papio'', one of the 23 genera of Old World monkeys. There are six species of baboon: the hamadryas baboon, the Guinea baboon, the olive baboon, the yellow baboon, the Kinda baboon and the chacma ba ...

that had survived a

leopard The leopard (''Panthera pardus'') is one of the five extant species in the genus '' Panthera'', a member of the cat family, Felidae. It occurs in a wide range in sub-Saharan Africa, in some parts of Western and Central Asia, Southern Russia, a ...

or saber-toothed cat attack as was evidenced by a healed wound over the eye. They also discovered many other animals and some indeterminate stone tools. No hominid fossils were discovered. Berger and Churchill worked in the Inner Deposits, and quickly discovered that this site was younger than the Outer Deposits and contained the remains of

Middle Stone Age The Middle Stone Age (or MSA) was a period of African prehistory between the Early Stone Age and the Late Stone Age. It is generally considered to have begun around 280,000 years ago and ended around 50–25,000 years ago. The beginnings of pa ...

d occupation by humans. They recovered over 25,000 fossil remains, many hundreds of tools including knives and spear points and fragmentary hominid remains dated to around 70,000 years ago.

Geology

Plovers Lake is a large series of deposits formed along huge fissures in a checkerboard pattern. The Outer Deposit is a

breccia Breccia () is a rock composed of large angular broken fragments of minerals or rocks cemented together by a fine-grained matrix. The word has its origins in the Italian language, in which it means "rubble". A breccia may have a variety of di ...

-filled dolomitic cave that has been de-roofed. The Inner Deposits have most of the roof intact and extend for several hundred meters. Most of the site has not been excavated.

Age of the deposits

The Outer Deposits have been dated to around 1.0 million years old based on the size of porcupines recovered. The Inner Deposits have been dated to greater than 70,000 years using radiometric techniques.

References

{{Greater Johannesburg Archaeological sites in South Africa Pleistocene paleontological sites of Africa Caves of South Africa Limestone caves Landforms of Gauteng South African heritage sites Middle Stone Age Archaeological sites of Southern Africa

History of investigations

Recovered fossils

Geology

Age of the deposits

See also

References