Broken Hill Man
On June 17th, 1921, a Swiss miner, Tom Zwigelaar, working in Broken Hill mine in Northern Rhodesia, modern-day Zambia, came across a mostly complete skull of an ancient human.
An English palaeontologist, Arthur Smith Woodward, later assigned the skull as the type specimen for a new species of hominid he dubbed Homo rhodesiensis. This discovery established Broken Hill as an important centre for the study of early humankind.
In modern times, the skull has been dated to between 300,000 and 125,000 years old. The classification of the skull as Homo rhodesiensis has also largely been discarded, with the ‘Broken Hill Man,’ as the remains became known, generally classified as Homo heidelbergensis.
The skull itself currently resides in the Natural History Museum in London. Zambia has made efforts to repatriate the fossil. In the meantime, a monument to the discovery of the Broken Hill Man has been erected on the grounds of the Civic Centre in Kabwe. The plaque on the monument is written in both English and Bemba.
Archaeological Significance
Broken Hill cave site was discovered in 1906 during zinc mining a dolomitic outcrop, No1 Kopje, in an area of mineralised limestone near the town of Kabwe. In the course of tunnelling through the outcrop, miners intersected a 30m long tunnel. The cave entrance had been blocked and obscured by rockfalls and the deposits were sealed further by the deposition of secondary zinc and lead ores. The highest concentration of artefacts and all the hominid remains apparently came from the back of the cave in an area that had slumped into a solution cavity below the water table. Most of the hominid remains, including a nearly complete skull now attributed to Homo heidelbergensis, were discovered in 1921 during quarrying when the remainder of the cave system was cleared. Nothing survived of No1 Kopje by 1930. Opencast mining of the hill and surrounding landscape had left a 100 m deep pit that has been filled with groundwater since 1994 when the quarry pumps were switched off.
The accidental discovery of the cave and its unsystematic clearance have left archaeologists with a minimal record of the context of the artefacts and their association with the hominid remains. The considerable quantity of bone and artefacts observed to have been removed from the cave has largely been lost, with small collections now curated in Livingstone Museum (Zambia), Albany Museum (South Africa) and Natural History Museum (UK).
Three bone objects from the site of Broken Hill were described in the 1940s as formal bone tools. The intentional shaping of bone to make tools and other artefacts has long been accepted by archaeologists as an indicator of behavioural modernity. Shaped bone tools are recognised as part of the technological repertoire of some Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers in southern Africa. Currently accepted dates for the earliest bone working technology in the region range from ~70-90 ka. The claim for bone tools at Broken Hill takes on added significance in light of new dates from south-central Africa which place the development of composite stone tool technology in the later Middle Pleistocene (~300 ka). If these bone objects are indeed tools and associated with the hominid use of the cave, they may be the oldest evidence of bone tool working in the archaeological record.
The Cache
The monument is located on grounds, in front of the Civic Centre in Kabwe, Zambia. The Civic Centre is on Freedom Way, east from the Big Tree and next to Tusker's Hotel. The Civic Centre keeps normal business hours but the monument is best viewed from the always-accessible sidewalk in front of the centre. There is lots of on-street parking nearby. though people may offer to mind your car. Food and toilets are available nearby in Tusker's Hotel if required. See Hint