Rising Star vs Sterkfontein: Two Caves, Two Eras of Discovery

Drive an hour northwest of Johannesburg and you enter the Cradle of Humankind, a cluster of dolomite caves that has produced more early-hominin fossils than almost anywhere on Earth. Two of those caves tell the story of palaeoanthropology itself. Sterkfontein has been yielding ancient skeletons since 1936. Rising Star burst into the headlines in 2015 with an entirely new species and a radically new way of doing fieldwork.

The Rising Star vs Sterkfontein comparison sets the old guard against the new — two cave systems, the same limestone country, but a near-century and a world of method between them.

What is Sterkfontein?

Sterkfontein is the grand old institution of human-origins research. Excavation began in 1936, when Robert Broom started pulling australopith fossils from its lime-mined breccia. In 1947 he and John Robinson recovered "Mrs Ples" (Sts 5), a beautifully preserved Australopithecus africanus cranium that became an icon of the species first defined by the Taung Child.

Its greatest treasure came later: "Little Foot" (StW 573), a virtually complete Australopithecus skeleton that Ron Clarke and his team spent two decades excavating from the rock-hard cave fill, dated by cosmogenic methods to around 3.67 million years ago. With deep, complex deposits worked by figures like Phillip Tobias, Sterkfontein has produced hundreds of specimens across millions of years and remains one of the richest australopith sites anywhere. Its star species has a full Australopithecus africanus page.

What is Rising Star?

Rising Star is the upstart. In 2013, cavers spotted hominin bones in the Dinaledi Chamber, a pocket reachable only by squeezing through a vertical chute as narrow as 18 centimetres. Lee Berger assembled a team of six slender excavators — dubbed the "underground astronauts" — to reach it, and what they found was extraordinary: over 1,550 fossil specimens from at least 15 individuals of a previously unknown species, Homo naledi.

Announced in 2015, naledi stunned everyone twice: first with its mosaic anatomy (human-like feet and teeth, a small australopith-sized brain, climbing-adapted hands), and again in 2017 when it was dated to just 335,000–236,000 years ago. Its discoverers controversially argue the bodies were deliberately placed in the cave, and have even claimed wall engravings — both bitterly debated. See the Homo naledi page and our deep dive on Homo naledi vs Australopithecus.

The key differences

Time and species

The two caves sample opposite ends of the human story. Sterkfontein is a window onto the australopiths of three to two million years ago. Rising Star captures a small-brained member of our own genus, Homo naledi, surviving to just a few hundred thousand years ago. Same limestone, wildly different chapters.

Eras of science

Sterkfontein embodies twentieth-century palaeoanthropology: decades of patient work on breccia, named hominins emerging one by one, ideas worked out over careers. Rising Star embodies the twenty-first-century version — rapid, team-based, open-access excavation, live-streamed to the public, with data and casts shared widely and quickly.

Signature controversies

Each cave has its defining argument. At Sterkfontein it is dating — pinning down the age of jumbled cave fill, and the hard-won 3.67-million-year date for Little Foot. At Rising Star it is behaviour — whether Homo naledi deliberately disposed of its dead and made marks on the walls, which would push complex mortuary behaviour deep into the past and into a small-brained species.

How are they connected?

Both are dolomitic limestone caves in the same UNESCO World Heritage landscape, and both pose the same fundamental challenge: cave deposits are notoriously hard to date. Bones accumulate in chambers over long, messy spans, so researchers lean on methods like cosmogenic nuclide burial dating, uranium-series, and electron-spin resonance rather than the neat volcanic-ash clocks of East Africa's Olduvai and Turkana. The Cradle of Humankind is, in a sense, one giant fossil trap that these caves sample at different depths.

Why it matters

Side by side, Sterkfontein and Rising Star show how far the science has travelled. Sterkfontein anchored the very idea that humanity's roots lie in Africa, fossil by patient fossil. Rising Star proved that the Cradle still holds shocks — a brand-new species, found in our own century, that refuses to fit the tidy ladder of brain expansion. Together they map not just human evolution, but the evolution of how we study it.