Charles Darwin spent most of his time geologising at the Cape - as he did everywhere else on the voyage of The Beagle. Andrew Smith, the Scottish surgeon, naturalist and zoologist and the first Superintendent of the South African Museum in Cape Town, accompanied him to the important Cape Peninsula sites, and he collected a variety of rock specimens. He kept a special geological notebook in which he described in considerable detail his geological and geographical observations of the road from Simonstown to Cape Town, Table Mountain, Lion’s Head and Rump, the Sea Point Contact, the road to Paarl, Paarl Rock, the Drakenstein Mountains, Franschoek and the pass to Houw Hoek, Sir Lowry’s Pass and the Cape Flats.

Download the original article which appeared in the South African Journal of Science.

The Darwin Exhibition: Darwin and the Cape, opened at the Iziko South African Museum on Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town on 23 November and runs until April 2010. It is one of the many events celebrated in South Africa this bicentennial year. Professor Chris Stringer Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and world renowned palaeontologist from London’s Natural History Museum, opened the exhibition and delivered the Nelson Mandela Science lecture at the University of the Western Cape the following day.

Focusing on Darwin and his visit to the Cape in 1836 presents a unique opportunity to reclaim this heritage and also introduce the public and learners to issues of science and local history that they could identify with more readily.

The Darwin ‘story’ brings this remarkable scientific thinker into South Africa and into the present day.

Darwin and the Cape is a collaborative project with Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, the Africa Genome Education Institute and Iziko Museums of Cape Town (South African Museum).

Enquiries:  Olga Jeffries 021 4813897 | Download press release

www.iziko.org.za

The genius of Charles Darwin shows us that we have so much more in common, as human beings, than we have things that separate us. Once you’ve peeled away the superficial markers of “identity” – like skin colour, shape of nose or mouth, weft of hair – you find we’re all built of the same stuff. Our bodies are the result of about seven million years of evolutionary process that took place right here in Africa.

The “deep roots” of our anatomy evolved in Africa, before colonisation of the rest of the world began. It is only in very recent times, possibly the past 50 000 years, that superficial differences like hair colour and eye shape began to creep in as groups of humans settled into different parts of the globe and began to develop common features in isolation from other groups of humans.

“Our shared species features originated here in Arica,” anthropologist Prof Chris Stringer from the London’s Natural History Museum said during the Nelson Mandela Science Lecture at the University of the Western Cape, on Wednesday. The lecture marked the 150th year since the publication of Darwin’s groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.