Last Ape Standing Dispatch #5: At the Tip of South Africa

This post was originally published on November 15, 2019 on a previous version of ChipWalter.com.

The view of the Indian Ocean (and rocks below) at the archeological dig.

The next morning we were up and off at 9 am, well schooled in the ways you could be snake-bit, bushwhacked by baboons or swept out to sea. Everyone’s gear was jammed into three Toyota Land Cruisers and off we went with cameras, lasers, a week’s worth of camp food for 12 people and various other archeological apparatus. The wind had been howling over the little compound all night, angrily rattling sections of the tin roof and shaking the windows in their panes with gusts that approached 70 miles an hour, but none of it slowed the packing that morning. The wind was still blowing, but the sky was an iridescent blue with not a cloud as we bounced through the compound’s gate headed for the Indian Ocean.

For more than an hour we bumped and bounced like bobble heads through the reserve heading east and south. We weren’t traveling on anything you would sensibly call a road. A wide path, really, that had been crushed enough by four wheel drives to qualify as some sort of thoroughfare. Here and there rows of cinder block had been embedded in the tire tracks where floods were common to make sure the road didn’t completely disappear when a good storm came through. Even then, however, sometimes sections did.

Around us rocky edifices—that weren’t really mountains, but you wouldn’t call them hills either––arose and passed. They stood, perhaps, 750 feet high. The vegetation was thick but low and the only trees were those imported from Australia, mostly occasional clumps of Eucalyptus. This area of South Africa, Henshilwood said as we caromed up and down on our seats, had more diverse flora than any other place in the world, even more than the Amazon jungle. You wouldn’t know it looking from the rolling perspective of the Land Crusier. It all appeared pretty scrubby and nondescript, but then Henshilwood stopped and I looked closer I could see that within a few square yards hardly one plant was the same as the others around it. There were reeds and bushes and flowering plants, some cactus-like, some deciduous. A lot of them were herbs, said Henshilwood, that ancient people may have used to make tea or healing poultices. They probably knew every plant and its properties wherever they roamed, as well as we could navigate the Internet or fathom the ins and outs of the cities where we live.

In time we came to a precipice that ran along a short ridge and there to our right sprawled the sky and the endless Indian Ocean rising up to meet it, like two great cosmic blue hands. It was magnificent!

On our way to the caves … the dark areas to the right above the ocean — that’s where we were headed.

We navigated the Land Cruisers down an exceedingly narrow path to the rocky beach below, and there began to haul our gear into the camp — a row of tents outfitted for two each, a camp kitchen, some rigged showers and other wilderness amenities. (See pictures). The whole base stood at the heels of hard blocks of rock colored orange by the lichen that have been growing on it for tens of thousands of years. To the right the cliffs, to the left rock and ocean crashing upon it.

Quickly gear and food were stowed and the team prepared to head to the archeological dig in caves above the ocean about a kilometer to the west. This wasn’t far, but it was a bitch to get to. Despite the ceaseless pounding of the seas for the past 10,000 years, the rocks along the shore were big, rounded balls of calcite interspersed with body sized shards of more calcite, a particularly hardy mineral.

Looking back from the cave down the coast to camp. You know when you look at a map and see the very tip of Africa? That’s where we are.

Millions of hand sized mini-boulders were strewn everywhere. Except for one small, sandy crescent of beach just beyond us, there wasn’t a level space to be found. I followed the team members who knew the route by rote and we scrambled over hills, mini-plateaus, through crevices and splashing waves, up one aluminum ladder tied down by rope, another rope for pulling yourself over a hump in the land rising to the caves and finally to the dig itself where more than 100,000 years ago humans, very much like you and me lived and died, and left the evidence of their living behind for the people I was with to unearth.