Biology Reference
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off from a further inland trading station owned by Joao Albasini, the early Portuguese inland
trader, and discovered the city in 1871. He claimed it was Ophir, the place where the Queen of
Sheba and Solomon sourced their gold, but failed to convince anyone of his find. It is a stretch,
but it may be that the Dravidian Komate sailors exported the gold from the eastern Sofala
African coast to southern India, which is why some believe the gold for Solomon came from a
place in India called Ophir through three yearly imports by Phoenician cargo boats. India has
little in the way of gold mines.
Although left untouched, Mapungubwe was only re-explored again in 1932 when nine
kilograms of gold artifacts were found, including a single horned rhino. The apartheid
governments, for political reasons, kept the find and site a secret. The city dates back to about
1070 AD and like the more famous but younger Great Zimbabwe ruins, just north of
Mapungubwe, housed a large population of about 5,000 people in a complex and apparently
civilized society and fortified city. African white and black rhinos have two horns.
White Rhino
So why was an Indian or Java like single horned gold rhino sculpture, and also Chinese
pottery, found in this city? Clearly, trade occurred far and wide. Some 2,000 ounces of gold
were found in Great Zimbabwe and another twenty kilograms in the younger Dhlodhlo city in
the late 1800s. At Dhlodhlo in a church there was an ivory crucifix found that had a nine-foot
long vertical member and six foot horizontal parts - quite extraordinary elephant tusks! Also
part of this ancient network was Thulamela, a village with unique stone walled houses located
at Pafuri near the Limpopo River in the Kruger Park and also found to have gold. Nguni huts
are not made typically with stone walls.
The Thulamela area of the Pafuri triangle marked by Crooks Corner is a remarkable area, as
Professor Lee Berger, the discoverer of H. Sedibe, has pointed out, for its museum like record
of primitive animals and bipeds over eons. Originally the Limpopo River in this area
originated on the other side of Africa in the Angola highlands but now only rarely does the
water overflow from the Okavango Swamps into the Limpopo system. At the base of the
Lanner Gorge in this area the Lvuvhu (hippo) river flows over rocks from the apparently the
Permian age when Pangaea existed, and above this layer is the Triassic layer. Above these
rocks are remnant fossils from the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. There are also ancient
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