Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa, since the Archean Eon which is roughly 2.7 billion years old. This isn’t just an ordinary heap of debris sitting on metals; it's one of the main contributing factors in the geology as well as the economy of the whole continent. The landscape across Johannesburg looks barren and scarred due to mining towers and highways under construction, but this guise veils what sits underneath.
Geological studies and mining records show that roughly 40 percent of all the gold ever extracted on the entire planet came from this single basin. Witwatersrand Basin remains the only region on Earth to have sustained that level of production for more than a century of continuous mining.
