Mystery upon mystery

S

outhern Africa is the world’s richest region in natural mineral resources.

  Evidence of mining in South Africa has been found to go back more than 70 000 years. Over decades modern miners in the Ottosdal area of the Western Gauteng Province, South Africa, have come across hundreds of hard metallic alloyed spheres. Found in sedimentary layers of pyrophyllite formed about 2.8 billion years ago, the origins of the perfectly balanced, often grooved spheres are a complete mystery.

Who laboriously shaped millions of brick-like, pure granite blocks to construct in the heart of central southern Africa, the southern hemisphere’s largest ancient temple? Why were the first European explorers told by the local Bantu people in the land that became Zimbabwe, that no one knew who had constructed the magnificent, but overgrown, abandoned edifice? It was said by the natives that the great temple was made by white men when the stones were soft.

Who constructed 1.5 million acres of abandoned, worn, stone-faced terraces in the well-watered Nyanga Mountains of modern Zimbabwe? When questioned by European explorers as to who made the terraces, cunningly designed irrigation channels and thousands of enigmatic, well-made, large stone-faced pits above the terraces, the local people knew nothing of their purpose – nor who moved 500 million tonnes of stones to make the vast complex in its entirity.

From the 16^th. to 19^th.centuries European explorers and hunters discovered that the land now known as Zimbabwe was littered with the long-abandoned remains of more than 75 000 ancient mine shafts, pits, and riverside dumps from which tens of thousands of tonnes of copper, and hundreds perhaps thousands of tonnes of gold had been removed. In nearby South Africa enormous quantities of copper, tin and tens of thousands of tonnes of haematite and specularite have been mined over a vast period of time. Nothing definite is known of destination of the minerals or the ancient people who carried out these activities.

How did a small fiercely independent tribe of Bantu people – who claim to have built the temple and descent from afar – come to have strong traces of Semitic, Jewish, Cohen genes in their blood estimated to have origins 3 000 years old – and practice the Mosaic Code?