Written in the bone

Jayson Ortman finds bones. Lots of them.

He's just been contacted by the builders working on a police station on the West Coast. They were excavating a foundation when they found the skeleton.

Jayson's not a forensic researcher as in the American television series CSI. He's a contract archaeologist based at the University of Cape Town, the people who get called in to do the pre-historical version of an environmental impact assessment when golf courses, suburbs, roads and office blocks are proposed.

And the bones he's interested in might be Khoi-Khoi and Strandloper. They could be late, middle or early Stone Age. There are discoveries to be made, all over the country.

And in the Western Cape, there is a mystery to be solved: there's a thirty-thousand year gap in the remains. People, people, people, gap, people again. Why the gap?

Did people starve, die in an outbreak of illness, or did newcomers chase them into the less welcoming inland regions - and if, where is the evidence of the newcomers?

Did the cave-dwellers follow game - and if so, why did the game leave? Did it have something to do with changing sea levels and the ice ages froze and thawed large quantities of water? Nobody knows.

Jayson led a troop through the fynbos to the famous Peer's Cave this past Saturday as part of African Origins month, courtesy of funding from SAASTA. Peer's Cave is where skeletons dating back to about 11,000 years of age have been found and accurately radio carbon-dated.

People back then, it seems, had the slightly unnerving habit of burying some of their family members about 30 centimetres under the ground in the same place where they ate, cooked and slept. These days, such behaviour would get you front page status in the Daily Son or another tabloid.

Meanwhile, other evidence of people - shell middens, ash fires, rubbish dumps - date back even further. The Cape was attracting tourists (ok, hungry people in search of shellfish) even then.

And this posting is to let you know that the camera does lie.

Ronnie Adonis of Nyanga, Julie Cleverdon of Claremont and Nozipho Mthembu of Rondebosch look pretty cold and wet and miserable, don't they? Moments after the camera was packed away, the sun shone and it was a gorgeous day.

Cape weather. I ask you.