Geologists continue human fossils search
Nnasaretha Kgamanyane | Sunday October 29, 2023 06:00
Even though their three-year project, which started in 2020 elapsed, the duo managed to get four-year funding and managed to lobby for funding for three Batswana students of Masters of Archaeology, Biology and Zoology.
In an interview with Arts&Culture, Segadika described Bruxelles as the ‘bishop’ of the archaeological world.
He said Bruxelles, who worked in France before working in South Africa, has demonstrated his experience after his findings that the human origins were not only 2.7 million years but goes back to 3.7 years. He said Bruxelles was also able to unravel the stratigraphy, the arrangement of layers within the caves, a discovery that earned him (Bruxelles) massive respect in the field.
“The people who talk about human evolution said East Africa is the main area for human origins but in South Africa, they found human origins where they made mistakes because they said they dated 2.7 million years.
The mistake comes from the way they were doing things. We are looking for human bones. In 1, 000 bones we might find one human bone with human origins. If we find one, we can put Botswana on the map,” he said.
For his part, Bruxelles said the main objective was to find part of the development of humankind somewhere between East Africa and South Africa. He pointed out that to date Australopithecus were found across all of Africa but not only in one place. He added that they should get to cross Botswana where there are some caves. He added that caves could trap some human fossils.
He stated that they were looking for caves that had long stories like in South Africa and which could have hominids adding that they found such caves at Gcwhihaba and Koanaka.
He explained that the caves have very slow landscape evolution and are full of bones and sediments. Bruxelles said since they found the artefacts, they concluded they should as such be between two and three million years old. “We have started to clean the soil around the caves because now we have found there was a roof but as they got old the roof was eroded therefore exposing the inner part. When you walk, you walk on bones and sediments and they are now stagnant because there is no roof.
We have bones in a lot of places. We have cleaned bones in one of Koanaka twin sites and this year we will be cleaning on the other side. We want to see which of the bones yield more interesting findings,” he said. He added that they had the stories of macro mammals, with very small bones but as they had to adapt to the landscape evolution.
He said they had the story of macro mammals, landscape evolution and climate evolution. He said even though they had not yet found the human bones, they found tools that indicated that humans lived there.