Perspective: Africa (June 2016) Perspective: Africa (June 2016) | Page 14

Perspective: Africa - June 2016

out a story: many of them show unmistakable evidence of having been
chipped, honed and shaped into
stone-age tools.

australopithecus africanus and homo
habilus). His wife and fellow paleontologist, Dr Kathy Kuman from
School of Geography, Archaeology
and Environmental Studies of the
University of Witwatersrand, hired
Nkomba in August 2006 to assist
her team of post-doctoral students
to investigate.

The late great amateur botanist Tony
Abbott, a self-taught custodian of
the Pondoland Centre of Endemism
had come across them while searching for more species of endemic
plants. In the inverse to Nkomba being named after a tree, Tony’s name
now graces five species of indigenous
flora, including another rare and
threatened tree, Lydenbergia Abbotti. Tony had noticed that many rocks
scattered among the dunes had been
unmistakably shaped and worked
into hand tools.

Alas, while the team of scientists
ventured out to see the prehistoric
artifacts, they found themselves up
against a defining life moment – a
crossing over to what was to become
a decade-long contest between the
life forces of truth, goodness and the
power of love versus death forces of
deceit, evil and the love of power. It
was as if the stones were crying out
for that story to be told.

By whom?
Tony called upon his famous paleontologist friend Professor Ron Clarke
(yes, we do share a common ancestry, probably somewhere between

Their convoy of vehicles was suddenly confronted by two unyielding men, the brothers Qunya, who

Stone-age tools
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