Sello Lucas Sekowe

Like father, like son

Most people who work at the Sterkfontein Caves loved fossils long before they arrived. Sello Lucas Sekowe, the site foreman and a fossil technician, first visited Sterkfontein as a boy, but only much later came around to the idea.

“My father, Simon Sekowe, used to work here as a foreman. I would come here with him during school holidays,” he recalls.

When his father suddenly passed away in 1997, Sekowe’s dreams of tertiary study evaporated. It was then that the Sterkfontein supervisor at the time, Professor Ron Clarke, gave him an opportunity; at a loose end, but not really enthused about the offer, he took it.

“Professor Clarke provided me with in-service training. Most things, I learned from him. At first I wasn’t interested, but in time I learned to love these fossils,” smiles Sekowe, who lists Clarke, archaeologist Professor Kathleen Kuman and the current Sterkfontein supervisor, Professor Dominic Stratford, as his inspirations.

“I’m here today because of them. I know all [that I know] because of them, and I provide for my family,” he says.

Sekowe and his team of fossil technicians do a lot of specialised work in support of the palaeoanthropologists, archaeologists, geologists and other academic researchers who come to Sterkfontein. Responsible for identifying, sorting, cleaning and cataloguing fossils, their expertise is vital to the significant discoveries that continue to be made.

And their work is more complicated than it sounds: they need to be able to distinguish between carnivore, primate, hominid, bovid and microfauna fossils, as well as identify individual species and also date them, before cataloguing them digitally (the latter is the entire team’s least-favourite task, and so they take turns at it).

Nevertheless, Sekowe and his team are driven to keep searching for undiscovered archaeological riches, much like prospectors who never tire of their quest for gold.

“Every day you get to learn things. You don’t know what you’re going to find – if you find anything at all. You can easily go through 15 buckets of breccia, only to find one fossil,” Sekowe says.

But that one fossil provides Sekowe with enough impetus to keep searching for the next big one, and Sterkfontein is the place to do it. There has to be more.

Says Sekowe, “It’s nature around here – no one made this place. And our ancestors came from here. This is where the most complete skeleton – Little Foot – was found.”