Drimolen

The Drimolen Palaeocave System consists of a series of terminal[disputed – discuss] Pliocene to early Pleistocene hominin-bearing palaeocave fills[1] located around 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of Johannesburg, South Africa, and about 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) north of Sterkfontein in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Cradle of Humankind.

This also involves collaborations with David Strait of Washington University in St Louis, who runs a US based field school at Drimolen every June,[4] as well as researchers from South Africa, Australia, the US and Italy.

All the hominin remains have been recovered from the classic area of the site known as the Drimolen Main Quarry (DMQ), and include remains of Paranthropus robustus, early Homo and Homo erectus [5][6] DMQ has been dated to between ≈2.04 and 1.95 Ma based on a combination of uranium-lead (U-Pb), uranium-series electron spin resonance (US-ESR) and palaeomagnetism.

[2] DMK has not yielded any hominin remains but has been dated to a much older time period around 2.61 Ma,[2] making it similar in age to sites such as Sterkfontein Member 4 and parts of the Makapansgat Limeworks.

It is not known how the two caves relate to each other and whether they were once part of the same interconnected cave system, but basal speleothems in each deposit have been dated by uranium-lead to ≈2.6 million years ago, the same age as flowstones underlying the Australopithecus africanus bearing Sterkfontein Member 4 and capping the A. africanus bearing Makapansgat Limeworks Member 3 deposits.