Gary Koekemoer: We can build SA, bit by bit

For most of us, the annual Christmas-to-New-Year festive season has us focused on two time perspectives. One is a birth event that took place some 2 000 years ago and the other is the next 365-day circumnavigation of the sun – that thing we call a “year”.

The mix of past and future perspectives naturally leads to an emphasis on what we hold dear – families and friends: relationships with those we care about.

We’ll travel hundreds of kilometres, spend hours preparing homes and meals, and spend small fortunes on gifts – all just to be in close proximity with those special people for moments of connection. And next year this time we’ll do the same. Except this Christmas and New Year were slightly different for South Africans – the party that holds sway in parliament changed its leadership.

It’s left some grimacing (the ex-president especially if one looked at his face when the results were announced), but, taking a leap of faith without any hard data to back up the view, the majority of South Africa is overjoyed at the possibility changing the leadership may bring us.

Within eight years the hopes that underpinned the decision we took in 1994 have been badly bruised. Eight years is a long time.

On a nondescript hill just outside of Uitenhage, there’s a bunch of people who literally sweep the earth and who have a somewhat different time horizon.

A multi-national team of close on a dozen archaeologists or, more specifically, palaeontologists (people who go nuts about fossils), led by Prof Andy Herries, of Australia’s La Trobe University and with links to the Albany Museum, are scratching and shovelling dirt in an attempt to understand what our ancestors were doing some 50 000 (and millions more) years ago.

At the Acheulian (Early Stone Age) site that rates alongside the internationally significant Sterkfontein and Pinnacle Point sites, the team are uncovering stone axes and tree stumps that get the palaeontological world in a frenzy.

This, in our backyard! Who would have guessed that Nelson Mandela Bay would be on the global map of significant human remains and that our ancestors have been hanging around for such a long while?

As you stare at your rapidly diminishing bank balance in your post-shop-‘till-you-drop recovery mode, and begin to grumpily think about how the state and others spend your taxes, the question you may be asking yourself is: why?

Why spend time and money brushing away dirt, carefully bagging and plotting each little item, orientating the digs to the north, and then writing up and publishing the results in articles that the ordinary Christmas shopper will never find in any glossy magazine?

It’s all about perspective. In our repeat loops of 60 minutes/24 hours/seven days/52 weeks we become lost in the immediacy of it all.

For Herries and his team of doctoral, and other aspiring dirt-fundis, their work centres around one critical factor – a thing called “in situ”.

A chipped rock found on the surface is interesting; found buried in its original position among the layers of soil that demarcate bygone eras, the knapped (deliberately chipped) handaxe becomes significant.

The hominid remains only have relevance when they are found in situ; in context.

It’s as relevant an insight in understanding our political and social mengelmoes of present.

To understand our country’s current president, you have to understand the man Jacob Zuma in situ.

Similarly should Cyril Ramaphosa succeed him as president of South Africa, we need to understand he, too, occurs within a context and as much as we’d wish him to, he’s unlikely to repeat the walking-on-water feat of some 2 000 years ago.

Amanzi Springs (the Uitenhage site at which the dig is taking place) was first excavated in the early 1960s and then lay dormant for more than 50 years until Herries, in collaboration with others, began working on it again in 2015.

Palaeontologists and their ilk will often work a site for years before producing a peer-reviewed paper on a single stone tool found in situ. It takes years of painstaking, detailed work to produce a single piece of the broader puzzle about how our ancestors lived.