What to See Inside Sterkfontein Caves
The guided cave tour, the fossil preparation laboratory and the upgraded museum — a concierge guide to the highlights of a Sterkfontein visit since the 2025 reopening.
A Sterkfontein visit divides into two halves: the guided tour underground, and the museum, exhibition, fossil preparation laboratory and Timeline Walk on the surface. Almost all of it is new. Flooding at the cave entrance in December 2022 closed the site for more than two years — the first public closure in its history — and it reopened on 15 April 2025 with LED lighting through the passages, new signage, a rebuilt preparation laboratory and an upgraded museum. This guide covers what you actually see in each part, in the order a visit runs, and what changed.
What is the guided cave tour like?
Every visit underground is guided — there is no self-paced route through the cave. Tours leave on the hour from 09:00, with the last at 16:00, Tuesday to Sunday, and each is capped at 30 people. Underground time runs 60 to 90 minutes. Helmets are required and provided, because the ceilings drop low in places and the route involves stairs, narrow passages and sections where you move through on a crouch. The cave holds a constant 20°C (68°F) whatever the weather above, so a light layer is more useful than a coat. The standard order of a visit is the cave tour first, then the fossil preparation laboratory, then the museum — worth knowing, because only the first of those three has a fixed departure time to be late for.
The descent runs down to the Elephant Chamber, the lowest point on the route. The passages are lit throughout with LED lighting installed during the recent upgrade, so this is not a torch-lit scramble — but it is a real cave rather than a walkway. Visitors commonly report well over a hundred uneven steps each way and a steep steel ladder section. The operator's own advice is closed-toe shoes, because conditions underground can be wet; no loose garments, given the stairs and tight passages; water with you; and handbags left behind. The rules underground are short and strict: follow the guide at all times, touch neither stalactites nor stalagmites, remove nothing from the cave, and do not disturb the wildlife — the bats in particular are residents, not scenery.
What will you see in the cave itself?
The rock is dolomite, not limestone, and the two ages involved are easy to confuse. The dolomite itself was laid down around 2.5 billion years ago and carries stromatolite structures built by the earliest photosynthesising life on Earth. The cave system dissolved out of it far more recently — 20 to 30 million years ago. More than 2.5 km of chambers have been mapped, of which the tour route covers only a part. In the Elephant Chamber and Milner Hall that dissolution is visible overhead as massive rock pinnacles hanging from the roof, and Milner Hall holds an underground lake marking the present water table — now far lower than it stood when the chambers were forming.
You pass stalactites and stalagmites that the operator describes as each formed over millions of years, and you can see fossils still embedded in rock. The prehistoric chambers once carried a fauna worth picturing as you walk through them — giant baboons, long-legged hyenas and sabre-tooth cats, all now lost to time. What separates Sterkfontein from a show cave is that excavation is still running here; the operator calls it an active excavation site like no other, and describes it as the only publicly accessible large cave in the Cradle of Humankind. The deposits have names worth carrying down with you. Member 2, in the Silberberg Grotto, is where the Little Foot skeleton lay in place until 1997. Member 4 accumulated as a talus cone beneath a vertical entrance shaft and runs roughly ten metres deep at the excavation faces.
What does the fossil preparation laboratory show?
The fossil preparation laboratory is a working facility, not a display about one. Inside it a technical team, postgraduate students and researchers clean, sort, document and catalogue fossil material — and not only Sterkfontein's, since the lab handles finds from numerous sites across the Cradle of Humankind. It was rebuilt as a state-of-the-art preparator's laboratory with support from the GENUS research centre ahead of the April 2025 reopening, and the public-facing element is genuinely new: before the closure there was no way for visitors to watch this work at all. You can now see it happening and talk to the people doing it. The lab is wheelchair accessible, as is the museum, which matters for anyone in your group skipping the cave.
What surprises first-time visitors is how unfinished the science looks. Whether you find student groups or specialist researchers at the bench depends on the day, but the work on view is the slow, physical end of palaeoanthropology: separating fossil from breccia, then recording what emerges. It feeds a research programme covering environmental change and its effect on early hominins, physical and cognitive evolution in the Cradle, and the links between southern and East African species across a record of more than three million years. Recent output from the site includes a machine-learning study of tooth marks on Sterkfontein hominin fossils that identified scavenging by brown hyenas. Wits, which runs all of this, holds the world's largest hominin fossil repository.
What is in the museum and the exhibition?
The museum was substantially upgraded before the site reopened in April 2025. Guides use it to tell the story of the first discoveries at the caves and of the iconic fossils of the Cradle of Humankind, which lands better after the cave tour than before it. Alongside the museum sits a newly developed temporary exhibition space, and this is where the genuinely rare objects are: iconic finds from both Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, one of only two full casts of the Little Foot skeleton, and the first complete leg of a Paranthropus, brand-new material recovered from Swartkrans Cave. Dr Matt Caruana has described the exhibition as built around ongoing, cutting-edge research rather than a settled account — a fair description of what is in the cases.
One misconception is worth clearing up before you arrive: the two originals everyone associates with Sterkfontein are not at Sterkfontein. Little Foot — specimen StW 573, unveiled in December 2017 after some twenty years of preparation — is curated in the Hominin Vault at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits in Johannesburg. Mrs Ples, specimen Sts 5, is held by the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria. What the site does have is the full Little Foot cast, the new Swartkrans material, and the cave the fossils came out of. Given that Little Foot is over 90 per cent complete against roughly 40 per cent for Lucy, and dated to 3.67 million years, the cast is not a consolation prize.
What is there to see above ground?
Above ground there are three fixed things — the museum, the fossil preparation laboratory and the Timeline Walk — and all three are wheelchair accessible where the cave is not. Scenic trails run out through the landscape the operator describes as where our ancestors once roamed, with interactive exhibits along the way. We will be straight about the Timeline Walk: the operator names it as one of the site's accessible features but publishes no description of its length, its content or how many panels it carries, so anything you read confidently describing it is guesswork. Budget time for it rather than expectations. The Curious Café is on site for a break between the cave and the museum, and the shop sells water — worth buying before you go down rather than after.
Allow two to three hours for the site as a whole. Because only the cave tour has a fixed departure time, the practical sequence is to book your hour, do the cave, then take the surface at your own pace. That also gives the above-ground half a proper role for anyone not going down: Wits does not recommend the cave tour for visitors with claustrophobia, acute asthma or mobility challenges, and states plainly that the caves are not wheelchair friendly, so a mixed group can split without anyone missing the visit. If you want more of the Cradle afterwards, Swartkrans is run by the same Wits operation and Kromdraai is another fossil locality nearby. The Maropeng visitor centre is a separate operation with its own ticket, and has not run Sterkfontein since 1 April 2024.
What changed in the 2025 reopening?
The site you visit now is barely a year old as a visitor experience. Severe flooding at the cave entrance in December 2022 did structural damage: intense rainfall saturated the soil, flushed material into the cave system, and cracked and eroded the softer rock, destabilising the structure. The site closed in early 2023 — the first public closure in its history — and stayed shut for more than two years, reopening on 15 April 2025. The rehabilitation went well beyond repair. Structural reinforcements went in, along with embedded seismic monitoring equipment that tracks rock movement inside the cave, and Wits is working with local authorities on improved water-flow management in relation to the nearby Bloubankspruit, where the flooding originated.
What came back is a different site. LED lighting now runs through the passages, new signage was installed along the walkway and inside the cave, the preparation laboratory was rebuilt as a public-facing facility, and the museum and exhibition space were rebuilt around it. The management changed too. Wits has managed Sterkfontein since 1966 but previously co-owned it with the Gauteng Provincial Government; from 1 April 2024 the Wits Faculty of Science took over all research and visitor operations at both Sterkfontein and Swartkrans, and full ownership passed to the university at the reopening. Dr Job Kibii has headed daily operations since April 2025, Professor Dominic Stratford continues as research lead and permit holder, and Ntobeko Mbuyisa is operations manager.
Frequently asked
What is the main highlight at Sterkfontein Caves?
The guided cave tour down to the Elephant Chamber, the tour's lowest point, combined with the working fossil preparation laboratory where a technical team, students and researchers clean and catalogue genuine fossil material.
Can you see the actual Mrs Ples and Little Foot fossils?
Not those originals. Little Foot is curated at the Hominin Vault at Wits in Johannesburg and Mrs Ples (Sts 5) at the Ditsong National Museum in Pretoria. The site displays one of only two full Little Foot casts.
How long is the cave tour, and how physical is it?
Sixty to ninety minutes. The route has stairs, narrow passages and crouching sections, helmets are required and provided, and visitors report well over a hundred uneven steps each way plus a steep steel ladder.
Is the cave made of limestone?
No — it is dolomite. The dolomite formed around 2.5 billion years ago, but the cave system itself dissolved out of it only 20 to 30 million years ago. Over 2.5 km of chambers have been mapped.
Is there a museum as well as the caves?
Yes. An upgraded museum and a new temporary exhibition space opened with the site in April 2025, alongside the Timeline Walk and the fossil preparation laboratory — all above ground and wheelchair accessible.
Why was Sterkfontein closed, and what is new since it reopened?
December 2022 flooding destabilised the cave entrance, closing the site for over two years. It reopened 15 April 2025 with LED lighting, new signage, seismic monitoring, a rebuilt preparation laboratory and an upgraded museum.
How long should I allow for the whole site?
Two to three hours. Only the cave tour has a fixed departure time, so book your hour, go underground first, then take the laboratory, museum, exhibition and Timeline Walk at your own pace.