They spent hundreds of thousands of years underwater and 25 years under Bruno Werz's bed. Finally, three of the world’s oldest known underwater artefacts — prehistoric hand axes found in Table Bay — have been handed over to a Cape Town museum.
Werz, one of Southern Africa's top maritime archaeologists, found the axes while excavating a shipwreck in about 8m of water near Paarden Island.
The primitive tools were used by man's earliest ancestors to gather and prepare food, and are surprisingly sharp despite enduring several ice ages.
• 4-million years ago (mya): Australopithecines appear. They have brains no larger than a chimpanzee’s but walk upright on two legs. First human ancestors to live on the savannah
• 2.5mya: Homo habilis appears. Its face protrudes less than earlier hominid, but still retains many ape features.
— IN NUMBERS
For an estimated 450,000 years they were buried in thick sand and under rocks, either on land when the sea level dropped during ice ages or underwater when the sea level rose again, which is how Werz found them while diving on a shipwreck site in 1995.
“They were at the bottom of a hole,” he told the Sunday Times this week during the handover at the Iziko South African Museum.
“They were in a reddish-brown layer of sediment. I knew immediately they were prehistoric tools. They must have dropped in mud soon after they were discarded and that would explain why they are still razor sharp.”
At that time, underwater artefacts were almost unheard of because most people assumed they could not survive water erosion. But since Werz’s discovery many more have been found elsewhere in the world on once-inhabited land.
“The fact that Bruno found the hand axes deep under sediments under the sea floor showed that such discarded tools could survive at least two or three complete glacial cycles on the continental shelf,” said Nicholas Flemming, a world authority on maritime archaeology and a co-author with Werz on several studies.
“If that could happen off the coast of South Africa, it could happen anywhere around the world, and archaeologists should both search for them and be on the lookout for chance finds by trawlers and commercial dredging.”
At the time of his discovery, Werz had located and excavated shipwrecks including the Waddinxveen (1697) and the Oosterland (1697). He moved to SA in 1988 from the Netherlands and has a keen interest in excavating Dutch East India Company wrecks.
Iziko Museum's social history curator Wendy Black said the axes added to collective knowledge about the movement of early humans and their ancestors.
The evolution and conformity of hand axes has allowed archaeologists to accurately associate these implements with Homo erectus, the first archaic human species to evolve a human-like face and gait.
“That’s when these tools popped up, from around 1.7-million to 300,000 years ago,” Black said. The hand axes were specifically designed for a human grip and most likely had multiple uses ranging from digging to breaking bone.
Since the axes were discovered, other scientists have found a series of submerged caves and reconstructed an underwater landscape in the Southern Cape that almost certainly would have been inhabited during glacial periods when the sea level was lower.
• 1.8mya-1.5mya: Homo erectus is found in Asia. First true hunter-gatherer ancestor, and the first to have migrated out of Africa in large numbers.
• 400,000 years ago: Early humans begin to hunt with spears.
— In Numbers
“The Cape south coast is the richest [place] in the world for middle-stone-age [archaeology], and we expect it is much the same on the seabed — except we can’t really get down there,” said Hayley Cawthra, chief scientist at the Council for Geoscience who is also a research assistant at Nelson Mandela University.
The rarity of this type of underwater find is what made Werz’s discovery all the more remarkable, Black said. “To find something like that is pretty lucky.”
Werz, who authored and co-authored several scientific articles about the hand axes while they were in his possession, said it was time they took up their rightful place in the national record. “They are everybody’s history,” he said.
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