The earliest known skull of Homo erectus – from a small child – is the latest treasure to shed light on SA’s ancestral history, and once again it was found at the Cradle of Humankind.

It took five years to excavate the fragments of the skull from the Drimolen cave system, and what it tells us is extraordinary: our first ancestor to be nearly human-like in anatomy and behaviour was walking the Earth up to 200,000 years earlier than we thought.

The two-million-year-old fossil also boosts the theory that the species originated in Southern Africa and not further east, as other researchers have suggested...