Rob McFarland – Travel Writer

Pool at Singita Lebombo safari lodge - photo by Rob McFarland

Deidre in the driver’s seat turns around and whispers to me: “Did you hear that?”

I can’t hear anything apart from my heart pounding between my ears. I’m in an open-top Land Rover in an area teeming with lions and my nerves are jangling from a heady mixture of fear and excitement.

We move towards the source of the sound and, eventually, I catch it: a low, cough-like bark that I never would have imagined could have come from a lioness.

“That’s her calling her cubs.”

Minutes later, we see her – a fully grown lioness – and for the next hour follow her as she meanders through the African bush. She is completely unfazed by our presence and at one stage walks so close to the jeep that I physically recoil when she glances up and looks me in the eye.

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Human evolution sculpture at Forum Homini

I’m sure if Mrs Ples’s husband had told her that in two million years’ time she’d be splashed across the covers of glossy magazines, she’d have told him to stop being an idiot and go out and kill something tasty for tea.

But having been unearthed in South Africa’s Sterkfontein Caves in 1947, she’s one of the reasons that a 47,000-hectare region 45 minutes from Johannesburg is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The area is known as the Cradle of Humankind and Mrs Ples is the affectionate term for the most complete skull of an Australopithecus africanus (our ape-man ancestor) ever found in South Africa. Since this seminal find, the region has produced more than 600 hominid fossils, making it one of the world’s most bountiful paleontological sites.

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