How long have baboons been in South Africa?
The oldest baboon fossil is a skull found in South Africa at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site. It’s thought to be more than two million years old. It was identified as belonging to the baboon species Papio angusticeps, which is closely related to modern baboons.¹
They have probably been on the Cape Peninsula for at least a million years and feature richly in Khoisan folktales² and South African rock art³. The first written records we have were by Europeans, starting from 1591 when an Englishman wrote “Here also are a great store of overgrown monkies…”⁴.
Baboons have lived in this area for millennia before the Rooiels township was founded in 1948.