A new absolute date from Swartkrans Cave for the oldest occurrences of Paranthropus robustus and Oldowan stone tools in South Africa

International audienceThe Early Pleistocene site of Swartkrans in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site has been significant for our understanding of the evolution of both early Homo and Paranthropus, as well as the earliest archaeology of southern Africa. Previous attempts to improve a faunal age estimate of the earliest deposit, Member 1, had produced results obtained with uranium-lead dating (U–Pb) on flowstones and cosmogenic burial dating of quartz, which placed the entire member in the range of >1.7/1.8 Ma and