Gladysvale Cave is a fossil-bearing breccia filled cave located about 13 km Northeast of the well known South African hominid-bearing sites of Sterkfontein and
Swartkrans and about 45 km North-Northwest of the City of Johannesburg,
South Africa. It is situated within the
Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site.
Gladysvale is the first cave that Robert Broom visited in the Transvaal in his mid-1930s search for a hominid-bearing cave nearer to Johannesburg than Taung. He visited Gladysvale after a butterfly collector from the
Transvaal Museum reported a "human mandible" in the wall of the cave. When Broom arrived at the cave the mandible was gone. Sterkfontein soon lured Broom away from the site. In 1946 Phillip Tobias led a student expedition to the site where a fine baboon fossil was recovered. In 1948 Frank Peabody of the Camp-Peabody expedition from the
United States spent several weeks at Gladysvale but failed to find any hominid remains. The site was lost from scientific memory until it was re-opened by Lee Berger and Andre Keyser in 1991.
Within a few weeks of excavation the first hominid remains were discovered - two teeth of Australopithecus africanus. This discovery made Gladysvale the first new early hominid site to be discovered in South
Africa since 1948 (when the last site - Swartkrans - was discovered by Robert Broom). Since the discovery of these teeth more than a quarter of a million fossils have been recovered from Gladysvale during excavations conducted by joint teams from the
University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Zurich and Duke University.
Many thousands of fossils have been recovered from the Gladysvale deposits including rare remains of hominids. From the Gladysvale external deposits, almost a quarter of a million bones have been recovered since excavations began in 1992. There are many millions of bones still in place in the cave. Fossils recovered include antelope, giant zebra, carnivores including extinct wolves, monkeys and hominids attributed to Australopithecus africanus and early Homo. Tools have also been found with the most spectacular being an Acheulean handaxe (pictured), recovered from 1 million year old sediments.
