Maropeng, which means, “returning to the place of origin” in seTswana, is the Cradle of Humankind’s official visitor centre, and it was Flow’s very first client, back in 2005.
The Maropeng Visitor Centre is a world-class, interactive exhibition that focuses on the development of humankind and its ancestors over the past few million years. As you venture through it, and you realise how long our ancestors have lived here, you can really see how, when you go to Maropeng, you are going home.
Your journey starts with a boat ride that takes you through the stages of the earth’s creation, of snow and ice and water, the formation of the earth’s crust and the shifting of tectonic plates. From there, you emerge to an audiovisual presentation on the formation of the earth.
The exhibition is self guided and can take anything from one to four hours, depending on your level of interest and time availability. It is highly interactive and enjoyable, and engages visitors of all ages.
One of the fossil displays was titled Evolution: digging for an understanding. The display illustrated and explained the theory of evolution made famous by Charles Darwin.
Recent displays have included Gondwana fossils, the land masses of the modern Southern Hemisphere were once joined in a “supercontinent” called Gondwana and the fossils exhibited at Maropeng were found around that time, and the recently unveiled sediba fossils, a 2-million-year-old fossil and new species of hominid, Australopithecus sediba, found in 2008 by professor Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand with a team of scientists he led to the Cradle of Humankind.
Not only is Maropeng a journey through time, but it is also a destination in itself. You can make yourself at home at the luxurious 4-star hotel or low-cost student accommodation, dine at any one of two gourmet restaurants, or make use of the conference facilities and amphitheatre.
When you first see the Tumulus, the building in which the Maropeng Visitor Centre is housed, it looks like a giant burial mound. At the end of the exhibition, when you turn and see it again from the back, it’s totally transformed – silver-grey and glass, hi-tech and futuristic. At that moment, you’re not at the end of history, but at the beginning of the future.
Flow designed and developed Maropeng’s website in 2008, did much of the writing, and contributed many of the images you see today. We continue to maintain the site, and keep content lively and up-to-date.
Recently, we also developed Maropeng’s online shop and are proud of its instant success. We are in the process of developing a tour operators’ shop and, judging by history, it is bound to hit a home run.