South Africa trip report, part 3
Friday, June 14th, 2013 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manJohannesburg is very leafy; there's trees everywhere, and large tranches of non-built up land (making the city larger than London, apparently). I liked it when I was there, but I think I like Cape Town more. There's nothing like having a mountain next to the city centre to liven a city up—and for this reason (if little else) the city reminded me of Edinburgh. Indeed, in the same way that Arthur's Seat is supposed to look like a recumbent lion, there's a couple of hills in Cape Town called Signal Hill (the lion's body) and Lion's Head. The difference is that they're not connected: you need to be viewing from the right angle to get them to join up! (I don't know whether it's coincidence that there's an Arthur's Road in Sea Point, and an off-licence on it called Arthur's Seat...)
Whilst I was in Johannesburg, I hired a car and drove to the Sterkfontein Caves, which are in an area called the Cradle of Mankind, where a large number of important hominid fossils have been found. There was actually little to see in the caves; even the skeleton being excavated at the present (which may turn out to be significant—we can't tell until it's fully excavated) was inaccessible behind a locked gate with barbed wire on top to deter fossil thieves. Actually, I had rather suspected as much. But I was pleased to have been able to be there, anyway. There were a lot of fossil remains in the museum, but no indication of which were real and which replicas. I know at least one was real, which had little numbers written on it—I doubt they'd have done that for a replica—and two were fake—both replicas of the Taung child skull, the original of which I'd heard the guide say was in the Civic Museum in Pretoria—but have no idea how the rest divided between them.
I also learned a cool new interesting fact, which is that Paranthropus bosei (which I first learned about in the mid-eighties from Richard Leakey's book The Making of Mankind, which is what put me onto palaeoanthropology in the first place) had a crest along the top of its skull for its huge jaw muscles to attach onto.
Right, that's the end of my pre-composed trip reports: I'd forgotten I'd got rid of my laptop after my first three days there—sent it back to work so I didn't have to shlep it around the country. Let's see if I can motivate myself to put a little time into composing further reports.
Whilst I was in Johannesburg, I hired a car and drove to the Sterkfontein Caves, which are in an area called the Cradle of Mankind, where a large number of important hominid fossils have been found. There was actually little to see in the caves; even the skeleton being excavated at the present (which may turn out to be significant—we can't tell until it's fully excavated) was inaccessible behind a locked gate with barbed wire on top to deter fossil thieves. Actually, I had rather suspected as much. But I was pleased to have been able to be there, anyway. There were a lot of fossil remains in the museum, but no indication of which were real and which replicas. I know at least one was real, which had little numbers written on it—I doubt they'd have done that for a replica—and two were fake—both replicas of the Taung child skull, the original of which I'd heard the guide say was in the Civic Museum in Pretoria—but have no idea how the rest divided between them.
I also learned a cool new interesting fact, which is that Paranthropus bosei (which I first learned about in the mid-eighties from Richard Leakey's book The Making of Mankind, which is what put me onto palaeoanthropology in the first place) had a crest along the top of its skull for its huge jaw muscles to attach onto.
Right, that's the end of my pre-composed trip reports: I'd forgotten I'd got rid of my laptop after my first three days there—sent it back to work so I didn't have to shlep it around the country. Let's see if I can motivate myself to put a little time into composing further reports.
