Clopus Seshoene

Every day is a day of learning

Things weren’t looking good for Clopus Seshoene when he failed Grade 11. He needed a foot in the door somewhere, for someone to just give him a chance.

That person was Sterkfontein Caves legend Professor Ron Clarke, the discoverer of the famous Little Foot fossil. Seshoene’s father, Solomon, worked at Sterkfontein under Clarke, and Seshoene had a brainwave.

“I wrote a letter to Ron Clarke, offering to work here without pay, and he said I must come. I worked here for a whole year [in 2012] without payment,” recalls Seshoene, who is a fossil technician and excavator.

That year was pivotal for him and he learned much from Clarke. Says Seshoene, “I like Professor Ron Clarke because he told me how to look at bones. I think he’s a good teacher – he’s got a big heart. He taught me a lot; I can tell a lot of things about bones. If I find something important, I can go to the lab and compare it with other samples.”

His enthusiasm and diligence did not go unnoticed, and when the current Sterkfontein supervisor, Professor Dominic Stratford, arrived in 2013, he hired Seshoene. A decade later they still work together, and every day is a day of learning for Seshoene.

He enjoys all aspects of his work, from the meticulous work of cleaning breccia off fossils using a dentist’s drill to excavating fossil-bearing materials. But his favourite part is finding those bits and pieces that help complete the human evolution puzzle.

“I like to excavate – a lot. You never know what you’re going to find. What’s interesting is when we’re sieving soft breccia in water after excavation for things such as bones, some stones, anything important,” Seshoene says.

Sterkfontein, says Seshoene, “teaches us about humanity”.

“This place can tell us where we come from. We have proof of us as Homo sapiens in Sterkfontein, and also Homo habilis and Homo erectus, and also Australopithecus. It teaches us where we come from, where we started,” he says.

Seshoene has plans to grow even further professionally at Sterkfontein, and he is learning to cast fossils from master preparators Kgame Abel Molepolle and Moyagabo Andrew Phaswana, who are regarded as among the best in the world. (They, too, were taught by Clarke.)

As he puts it, “I still have a journey to take here.”