Our next stop was at Mossel Bay, where we went to visit an important archeological site called “Point of Human Origin”, but we also had some fun zipping over the ocean.
The cliffs west of Mossel Bay have numerous caves, some of them containing traces of our ancestors which lived here 120,000 years ago! Archeologists found evidence for modern human behaviour, thousands of years earlier than in Europe and Asia.
“We know from genetic research that all people alive today are descendants of the core population of less than a thousand individuals who lived in Africa between 150 000 and 200 000 years ago – and what we’ve found here shows that at least a portion of this population lived in the area around Mossel Bay.” Dr Peter Nilssen
Fossilised sediment, piled high against the cave wall, contains the remains of stone artefacts, pieces of shell, charcoal from fires, pigment in the form of ochre, shards of bone and debris from the manufacture of tools.
Our next stop was back at Cape St. Blaize, where we took a trip on the zipline.
We had great fun, going over the ocean for more than a kilometre with the zipline.
Late in the afternoon we finally left Mossel Bay and made it until Swellendam, which we want to visit the next day – more on the following post!