Origins Centre, Wits University

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.