Date: Thursday 26 March 2026, 15:00pm (SAST)
Venue: Lecture Room
Teams link:
Professor Alan Whitfield
Emeritus Chief Scientist, and Honorary Research Associate, NRF-SAIAB
Our Southern African Heritage
Advanced modern humans evolved in the southern portion of South Africa from about 160 000 years ago onwards. This evolution and the departure of a group or groups of Homo sapiens from the region up the eastern African coast towards the Horn of Africa, occurred about 70 000 years ago. At least one group crossed onto the Arabian Peninsula about 50 000 years ago and from there they went on to colonise much of the world. This presentation will examine human evolution in the southern Cape and explore the possible reasons why these people left the Cape and undertook a journey from South Africa to Patagonia – all within a period of 40 000 years.
For more details, see the following article in The Conversation Africaby Prof. Whitfield et al.:
https://theconversation.com/where-did-the-first-people-come-from-the-case-for-a-coastal-migration-from-southern-africa-267299
