WEBVTT

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My goodness, it's colder than it looks. I actually need to put my jacket back on

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Okay, so

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Guys welcome to your first stone circle. This is what we call blowbush crawl ruin and this is supposed to be a natural heritage site

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And that's a sad part of it. You can see this was the plaque that was originally put here

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To you know commemorate this as a natural heritage site

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Sapi is supposed to look after it. There used to be a big sign here that sapi takes care of this heritage site

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That signs long gone

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So the only person that takes care of it right now is me and the team of people that bring up here every now and then to clear

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The grass pick up the rubbish and and not only this one several of the other stone circles up here in the sapi territory

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I do have a very good relationship with the with the

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new

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Forrester here

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Dumasani

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Previously there was Bruce McCarthy here and Bruce showed me a lot of other ancient sites in these forests

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He was here for 25 years or something like that and he knew a lot of ancient sites a lot of

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Drawings rock art as well, and I'm not talking about bushman rock art

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I'm talking about the other stuff the rock art, which we didn't even get to in the museum yesterday

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but so this stone circle is really important because this is the stone circle that was

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part of the 1939 blimphantane University

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Exploration and research study that was done here together with the two stone circles further down

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We normally stop on the way up and first get

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Oriented from there and then come up here, but because we did this here today

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We came here first so we're going to stop on the way down just so I can show you the fertility circle and

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How that connects to this part of the world?

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So the fertility circle down there is is the the marker that a silver omnic

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identified as the Dravidian fertility

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Symbol of fertility and and his study of southern Africa shows the the immense influence of of the Dravidians and

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You know people from India they were here thousands of years ago mining gold and the influence on

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African cultures or the cross-pollination of the two cultures on each other

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And that obviously doesn't go down well with with

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Afrocentric guys that are trying to push you know the importance of Africa and and undermining the

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the blend of society and and ancient civilizations in ancient times, so

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this was studied in 1939 and

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One of the key together with with all the other stone circles in the area

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There were no trees here in those days the photographs from that study show beautiful rolling hills of grass

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And what you need to what you can recognize if you just look around there

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It's just beautiful grassland rolling hills and mountains of grass

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All the trees that you see here are just in the last hundred years that have grown here

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There are no trees here in ancient times and this is where we find some of the largest concentrations of the stone circles among the

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Trees even going down towards Nelsprate

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So if you from here a hundred kilometer radius in any any direction the stone circles go on and on so

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It's just a vast vast area just to orientate you a bit so east is over there

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That's towards Nelsprate this way goes towards Leidenberg

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I mean Leidenberg is just covered in stone circles and ancient ruins

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Dahlstrom is up there

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We go back towards Middleburg and Woodbank that way that just carries on and then especially towards Carolina

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And then but plus that way that's just another huge area of high concentration of stone circle ruins and

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And so we are literally right in the heart of it here