Maropeng Visitor Center

Maropeng Visitor Center is located at The Cradle of Humankind Heritage Site in Gauteng province, South Africa. The Cradle of Humankind is the place in Africa where hominid fossils have been discovered by scientists. A visitor can tour 2500m² of exhibits with an underground boat ride. See fossils, learn about how humankind was born, view stone tools up to 1-million years old, and much, much more.
The Maropeng Visitor Centre is an exciting, world-class exhibition, focusing on the development of humans and our ancestors over the past few million years. This tourist attraction highlights the universal relevance of the Cradle of Humankind as our ancestral home.
Along the pathway to the Tumulus building you can stop to have a look at the site of an archaeological excavation. The Stone Age site has been excavated since October 2005 by scientists. Early stone tools were found here, that includes handaxes and cleavers.
Early humans and their ancestors came to the Maropeng area to use the local rocks for tool-making as they pursued a hunter-gatherer way of life. The technology of these tools suggests they were made sometime between 1.0 and 0.5 million years ago during the Earlier Stone Age, prior to the appearance of modern Homo sapiens.
In the Cradle of Humankind, about 1,000 hominid fossils have been discovered, spanning several million years.
The oldest hominid fossils from the Cradle are more than 3-million years old and belong to the genus Australopithecus. There were many species or types of Australopithecus, which lived in Eastern and Southern Africa. “Mrs Ples”, the famous fossil of a skull of an Australopithecus africanus, was discovered at the Sterkfontein Caves by palaeontologists Dr Robert Broom and John Robinson in 1947. “Mrs Ples” is about 2.1-million years old.
The architecture of Maropeng was based on the theme of discovery. When you approach the site, you see seven concrete fingers or 14m high concrete columns, signifying the centre, which moves in and out of sight along its approach. The concrete fingers have words on them that hint at the major themes of the exhibition, such as “Imagine”, “Explore”, “Contemplate”, and “Discover”.
The marketplace where you buy your tickets and a grassed amphitheatre that accommodates 10 000 people are sunken into the grounds around the Maropeng Visitor Centre, housed in the Tumulus Building. The Tumulus Building is evocative of a giant burial mound or perhaps an enormous buried fossil, with concrete “bones” sticking out the top.
When you first see the tumulus, it looks like a giant burial mound. At the end of the exhibition, when you turn and see it again from the back, it’s totally transformed – it’s silver, grey and glass, hi-tech and futuristic. You get a feeling that you’re not at the end of history, but at the beginning of the future.

Note:
Words on this writing are not my own. They were just extracted from a reading material I found somewhere. I am not a believer of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from Ape to Human. I believe that God created man as man, not ape. I believe that God created Adam and Eve, not Mr. and Mrs. Ples. Its unfair to my grand grand grand parents to say that they are Baboons.
I went to Maropeng not because I want to see where my ancestors came from. I went to Maropeng all for the glory of this hobby- photography.