The author and his colleagues looking for fossils at Birds River in South Africa.
Dmitry Shcherbakov
New insect treasures are almost certainly just waiting to be found by future palaeonentomologists.
Sweet sorghum ripening in Rwanda.
Ari Beser/Getty Images
Sweet sorghum has multipurpose post-harvest uses. It can produce grains, animal feed and sugary juice, making it unique among crops.
Children will often sing and dance for visiting tourists.
Pascal Deloche/GODONG
A school tour often sits within the itinerary of a tour of southern Africa, or alongside wildlife tourism ventures.
The author handling a boomslang as part of her work with a conservation organisation.
Chris Cooke
Learning about snakes offers unique insights into the natural world.
The Ora Loapi space at the 2023 Joburg Art Fair featured Shepherd Ndudzo’s work.
Courtesy Ora Loapi
His work can only be fully understood by observing the shared traditions of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The lessons pollen can teach us are not to be sneezed at.
Elisa Manzati
Pollen can become preserved in sediment deposits over thousands, or even millions, of years.
Cakase Kruiper, a San elder, explains her connection to the cosmos in the film !Aitsa.
© Dane Dodds and Med_Cine
To the ǀXam and San people, being in the world as a person includes “the sky’s things” - an understanding of and deep connection with the cosmos.
An artistic impression of the various dinosaur species that once roamed the Roma Valley.
Akhil Rampersadh
Fossilised tracks of a group of plant-eating dinosaurs have been found in Lesotho’s Roma Valley for the first time.
Images of one-horned rain-animals have been found in the northern parts of the Eastern Cape province.
Courtesy David M. Witelson
Some explorers believed they had found unicorns depicted on rocks. The truth behind the paintings is far more interesting.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the 2022 COP27 meeting in Egypt.
Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The kind of coverage favoured by South African media probably doesn’t do much to improve the public’s understanding of climate change.
The oldest known footprint of our species, lightly ringed with chalk. It appears long and narrow because the trackmaker dragged their heel.
Charles Helm
This was an area in which early anatomically modern humans survived, evolved and thrived, before spreading out of Africa to other continents.
The fishing village of Mahebourg, Mauritius, is among the places in the path of cyclone Freddy.
Laura Morosoli/AFP via Getty Images
Tropical cyclones are becoming more frequent in the Indian Ocean. Here’s why and what that means.
Both the Khoi and the San believed in a mythical animal, resembling a cow, whose horns were thought to have medicinal attributes.
Rodger Smith
The medicine container was found in a painted rock shelter. A radio carbon date of the horn container places it at around AD 1461-1630.
Being too hot isn’t just uncomfortable: it can be dangerous.
Angel DiBilio/Shutterstock
Simply put, southern Africans are experiencing heat stress more often than in 1979.
One day this fresh elephant dung could be a coprolite helping scientists understand the past.
Silarock/Shutterstock
Studying fossil dung offers another avenue for scientists trying to recreate ancient landscapes.
The Chapel of Nossa Senhora do Baluarte is just one of the attractions on Mozambique Island.
Francesco Monteiro/UNESCO
The Covid-19 pandemic has the potential to make tourism more sustainable in Africa, improving the lives of local communities rather than just catering to international visitors.
Descendants of the indigenous San people in the Kalahari Desert.
Eric Lafforgue/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Image
The first speech sounds were uttered about 70,000 years ago and not hundreds of thousands of years ago as is sometimes claimed.
The Stiletto Snake is one of the species found in Mozambique.
extinctorshy.org - Ali Puruleia
Even by conservative estimates, Mozambique’s snakebite figures are far higher than previously thought.
A site in Tsiokane (Lesotho) where diverse tridactyl theropod tracks are preserved.
Author supplied
Fossil footprints are a treasure chest of information.
A section of the Cederberg rock painting, digitally enhanced to emphasise red-ochreous colours.
© Neil Rusch
Sometimes archaeologists can “hear” the ancient past using acoustic methods.