Cape Talk, Saturday night

Was I would consider fairly aggressive, but he came to the conclusion that these might have been made by a female, perhaps carrying a child, was his conclusion. And one thing led to another. It got published and attracted a lot of international attention. But the problem in that whole area, which is in the West Coast National Park, is that these surfaces are very fertile ground for graffiti artists, and so you hardly

Have an exposed surface anywhere that doesn't, it's not just mired in graffiti. And Dave very soon realized that this was a recent exposure. Probably the block had fallen down recently, and the graffiti artists had not yet got there, or rather, they had almost got there because on that same surface, within 10, 20, 30 centimeters of these tracks, there was already some graffiti. So Dave realized the time was of the

Essence and if he didn't do something inadvertently, I mean, it wouldn't have been a graffiti artist intentionally defacing the tracks, but it would have happened anyway. And so he actually arranged for a helicopter to recover this loose slab and transport it into Cape Town, where the original, as you say, is now in the Iziko Museum. So it was, you know, absolutely heroic stuff from my perspective. And I have spent some time with master trackers in the Kalahari.

And in parts of the Congo rainforest. So I am aware of how they can read facts into signs which are almost and sometimes completely invisible to my less practised eyes. But it's extraordinary that Dave Roberts looks at this and concludes that it's a hominid, that it's a woman, and that she's probably carrying a baby. That's like fiction.

Yeah, and the problem is that the deposits in which we find these tracks, you know, they are sand, and often the sand is soft. And if you compare that with, say, volcanic ash or mud deposits in a cave, you know, we're not going to get the same anatomical detail preserved. So the international response to Dave's publication and interpretation wasn't always that favorable. People said, no, they're poorly preserved. It's not unequal.

Equivocal, you know, can we be sure they're hominin tracks, etc. But Dave stood his ground. And over time, look, we have discovered essentially this discovery of Eve's footprints opened the floodgates. And with my team, we realized that there's the potential for hominin tracks. And we've now found about 24 track sites of hominins along the Cape South Coast, which is the great preponderance of hominin tracks in the world. And the really cool thing is that in 2020,