Assume that mega-building is the club house and you can see from here how carefully positioned the golf course is, right on the edge of the cliffs. The 19th hole must be the sea. But the symbol of modern garden route development may prove to be an unlikely cover to one of the greatest treasures of southern Africa. And so it’s by the clubhouse that I’m meeting an international expert who’s exploring the extraordinary story of what lies below. 

 

Professor Curtis Marian and his team from Arizona have been here for 18 years, much longer in fact than the golf course. Beneath the glamour of the resort, Curtis’s work takes place in these simple caves, work that suggests that every single person on the planet can trace their origins to this very spot. 

 

Now as I understand it, the work you are doing is so significant, you could spend the rest of your working career here, is that right?

 

I could easily spend the rest of my working career here, I mean to dig one of these sites—13B, it took us 8 years.

 

It’s widely believed and understood now that we all come from Africa, so I guess the two remaining questions are where in Africa and exactly when?

 

We know that that lineage that leads to everyone appeared sometime between 200,000 and 140,000 years ago, we think that progenitor population was here on the coast of South Africa. 

 

So cave 13B holds some bigger ounces?

 

We think that those people lived in that cave?

 

Let’s go see it.

 

Ok. This way.