The predominantly dry deciduous forest community of the upland portion of the Palala River watershed is home to many large African mammals including Blue Wildebeest, Giraffe, White Rhino and numerous bovids.

The rock strata through which the Palala River has incised comprise a substantial sequence, up to 3 000 metres in thickness in places, of fluvial arenaceous sediments derived from an ancient highland several hundred kilometres to the north-east, and deposited in an elongated, fault-bound basin during a period between 1 900 and 1 600 million years ago.

The preservation of these un-deformed sandy strata, which include evidence of the first occurrence of free oxygen in the early Earth atmosphere, is due to their having been laid down on a remnant of the stable, primordial Kaapvaal craton, which has allowed them to remain almost unaltered and subject to little or no regional metamorphism despite their great age.

Subsequent uplift of these sediments, collectively named the Waterberg Group, has resulted in their forming today a plateau, elevated in the south by as much as a thousand metres above the surrounding plains.

The impermeable nature of the predominant sandstone strata, and its characteristic lack of substantial subterranean aquifers, means that most of the rainfall received across the plateau soon runs off rather than contributing to groundwater resources.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it is this low nutritive, dystrophic content of the soil that is largely responsible for the extremely high biodiversity that characterises the Waterberg plateau.

Bushmen, who lived a mobile hunter-gatherer way of life, produced ‘fine-line’, well-drawn art, using brushes made from animal hair, and red and yellow paint from powdered, iron-rich rocks (ochre) mixed with liquids such as water, blood or fat.

This is because Bushman art is a religious expression and the artist was trying to convey beliefs about the spirit world, and experiences during altered states of consciousness by ‘healers’ in the community.

The second group of people occupying Lapalala comprised Bantu-speaking, Iron Age farmers who settled in the valleys where dolerite provided fertile soils for their sorghum and millet crops, and where there was adequate grazing and water for cattle, sheep and goats.