South Africa boasts some of the best fossil records on Earth. Fossils are found in strata and rocks in many parts of the country. Some are billions of years old.
There are microfossils dating back to the Archaean epoch, between 3.5 billion and 3.3 billion years ago, in the Barberton Greenstone Belt in the Mpumalanga province. The fossils of now extinct invertebrates that lived around 444 million years ago have been found in the Western Cape province. So, too, have fossils of large animals like sivatheres (giraffids) and sabretooth cats, 5 million years old. The country’s fossils also contain an exceptional record of human ancestry, mapping our evolutionary history through time.
