The South African Palaeocave Survey has a new post reporting on a visit to the Taung site: “Taung Heritage Site: 17 June 2012”
We visited the Taung limeworks near the town of Buxton in the North West province. The site, which was designated a National Heritage Site in 2002 (see plaque photo), is quite large and was an active mine during the 1920s. It was later systematically excavated by paleoanthropologists from the University of California in the 1940s, and from the University of Witswatersrand between 1988 and 1992. Both the mining and excavations resulted in extensive dumps that surround the area of the site from which the skull is thought to derive. However, the exact location at which the skull was found can only be approximately reconstructed from mine records and historical documents after all, it was only recognized after it arrived in Johannesburg in a wooden crate!
A couple of weeks ago, the project posted about a trip to “Wonderwerk Cave”. This is an interesting blog to follow this summer.