Origins Centre, Wits University
Interactive museum tracing two million years of human origins through San rock art, fossils and stone tools.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Origins Centre at Wits University in Johannesburg opens with the San rock artists who painted the Great Dance, a ritual of trance and transformation researcher Ben Smith has spent years studying. You'll hear how those painted figures record a ceremony believed to summon a healing power, and how the San were later hunted and dispossessed by arriving colonists. It follows the art from the rock face to the museum's 2006 opening by then-President Thabo Mbeki, and what it means to place these images at the start of the human story.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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