Me and Mrs Ples

I think I have a new candidate for best part of the trip. To begin, we arrived at Karein's, a friend of Nathan's house in the capital city of Pretoria, home of the bulls (see the super 14 post). Karein had a hot meal ready for us along with two guest beds complete with a chocolate on the pillow. It was several steps up rfom the cow dung hut we stayed in the night before. To make it even better, I mentioned that I wanted to visit a place called the cradle of humankind, a site with paleontology significance, and her father had all kinds of insights into what to do. He even said that he could set us up with Dr. Francis Thackery at the Transvaal musuem. This would be an incredible honor!

THe next morning we got up at sunrise and had breakfast, prepared for us by Karein! Then we headed off to the city center where he amde a call for us over to the musuem. Unfortunatley Dr. Thackery couldn't meet with us but we were invited to see the famous fossil finds of Dr. Broom! The musuem has them locked up in the basement. When we arrived we met Stephanie, a paleontologist that works at the musuem. We were in for a very neat tour!

We bypassed the admission office and just walked right into the upstairs exhibit. At first, Stephanie was very formal and we went over stuff that was pretty basic. But Nathan was new to human evolution and it is always nice hearing professionals speak about these things so I just relaxed and went with the flow. Eventually, the tour became more informal and after about half an hour, it was basically like we were just talking with Stephanie as she gave us some cool stories about the finds and the people behind them.

Then, we went downstairs. We entered THE BROOM ROOM. Imediately I spotted Mrs Ples. It was amazing. A fossil that I had seen in books and read about for so long was right in front of me. She opened up the display and I actually got to touch and hold the skull in my hands. A 2 million year old ancestor, in my hand! For me, it doesn't get any better. For some people it's the pyramids, for others it's the collesuem. For me, it was this. Holding a hominid that lived so long ago. This peice of pre history. It was undescribable!

FYI - Mrs Ples is the name of a skull of australopithicus africanus, an upright walking ape that lived 2 million years ago. it was very human like in many regards. We also saw an africanus skeleton, and fossil remains of paranthropus robustus, a more robust hominid.

The tour ended two hours later when Stephanie showed us the lab and then talked about life as a fossil hunter. She let me drill her for a few questions that are helpful for the purposes of my screenplay.

From the transvaal musuem we went to Sterkfontein, a famous cave site where Mrs Ples was discovered along with several other fossil hominids. The tour over there was very cheesy, including a plasma screen TV short that explained how the caves formed and how the fossils were excavated. The host was much less helpful than Stephanie (although Stepahnie absolutely rocked so that is not saying much), but the caves were a lot of fun and also very neat to see a piece of history. I recognized many things from books and documentaries.

The best part, this day has given me a lot of excitemnt for my story and a lot of new ideas. And some pictures that, while goofy, are very neat to me. Footnotes: I have just written 6 blogs in less than 1 day and I have written each of them on a whim. So please forgive me for the typos and sloppy writing. Hopefully I will have more time in the days to come! Look for new pics. I am going to add them now.