Florisbad archaeological and paleontological site

The Florisbad archaeological and paleontological site is a provincial heritage site in Soutpan in the Free State province of South Africa. The most notable find at this site is the Florisbad Skull, the partial skull of an early human species that was discovered in 1932. In 1997 it was described in the Government Gazette as: The Florisbad fossil site consists of a sequence of Quaternary deposits associated with a thermal spring, situated 45 km NNW of Bloemfontein in central South Africa (28°46’S, 26°04’E).

There are two kinds of fossil context at Florisbad: naturally accumulated vertebrate fossil material from spring sedimentary contexts, which includes the human skull fragment, and archaeological remains from old land surfaces. The material from spring contexts represents mainly the remains of ancient carnivore hunting and scavenging around palaeo-waterholes associated with the spring. Spring sediments intrude into the horizontal or sub-horizontal deposits, which, in some cases, represent stable land surfaces.

The Florisbad foss