STERKFONTEIN CAVES - A WORLD HERITAGE SITE, Johannesburg, South Africa Tourism

An hour’s drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria, the Sterkfontein Caves are world famous for their fossil finds and a well-known visitor destination. The Sterkfontein Caves site is home to a top restaurant, conferencing facilities, easy access to the caves themselves, modern walkways and a boardwalk past the excavation site where world-acclaimed fossils have been discovered.
The tours at the Sterkfontein Caves, which start above ground and then take visitors deep into the caves, run every half hour, seven days a week.
Within the Sterkfontein Caves, scientists have discovered many hominid and other animal fossils, dating back more than 4-million years, to the birth of humanity. The most important and most famous of these fossils are “Mrs Ples”, a 2.1-million-year-old Australopithecus skull, and “Little Foot”, an almost complete Australopithecus skeleton that is more than 3-million years old. These fossils, both found in the Sterkfontein Caves in the Cradle of Humankind, tell us much about the precursors of modern humans, Homo sapien
The Sterkfontein Caves, situated in the Cradle of Humankind, represent one of the world's richest fossil sites, and discoveries there continue to astound the international scientific community. Here is a collection of sometimes surprising facts about the caves.
In the late 1890s gold miners dynamited the Sterkfontein caves in search of limestone which they converted into the quick lime required for processing gold. Their explosions revealed entrances to the cave system.Around 2.5-billion years ago, the area now known as the Cradle was a shallow inland sea.
An estimated 40% of all the world's human ancestor fossils have been found in the Cradle.The Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site has become a major international tourism destination with close to 400 tourism attractions, including 91 graded establishments.

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