But it was only six years later and many more explorations with amazing new discoveries on every trip to the mountain top, that the site was accurately surveyed and the true age of the monoliths was revealed. It turned out that the north, south east, west alignment is out by 3 degrees - 17 minutes - 43 sec. This means that we are dealing with a structure at least 25,000 years old based on archaeoastronomic calculations. Further studies of the geology, erosion, alignments with stars and lichen growth has allowed us to reach reasonable sound and scientific conclusion that this site is at least 75,000 years old, and possibly even older.

Mysterious ancient ruins of southern Africa.

It is estimated that there are over 20,000 ancient stone ruins scattered throughout the mountains of southern Africa. Modern historians have been speculating about the origins of these ruins, often calling them 'cattle kraal of little historic importance'. The truth of the matter is that closer scientific inspection paints a completely different and astonishing new picture about the ancient history of these stone ruins of southern Africa. The scientific reality is that we actually know very little about these spectacular ancient ruins and it is a great tragedy that thousands have already been destroyed through sheer ignorance by forestry, farmers and development.

After my personal explorations on foot and by air over the past year in 2008, I can confidently estimate the number of ancient stone ruins to be closer to 100,000.

This figure was confirmed by Prof. Revil Mason in January 2009.

This immediately poses a huge problem for archaeologists, anthropologists and historians because the accepted history of this part of the planet does not at any time in our past place anywhere nearly enough people here to have built this number of structures. It gets even more complex when you realise that these were not just isolated structures left behind by migrating hunter-gatherers. The true reality hits you when you take in the magnitude and expanse of these settlements and witness the staggering number of ancient terraces that surround these settlements that cover over 200,000 square kilometres and possibly much more. A detailed archaeological scrutiny of photographic evidence of some of these terraces shows some to be at least 5000 years old.

The complex that links Waterval Boven, Machadodorp, Carolina and Dullstroom, covers around 5,000 square kilometres, which is a larger area then modern-day Johannesburg.

Most of the original settlement structures are well buried beneath the soil and can only be seen from the air by a sensitised observer. It gets even more confusing when you observe the ancient roads that link all these settlements together and span what we have estimated to be at least 500 kilometres. The position of the ancient road sections that we have discovered suggest that it once ran continuously from the coast of Mozambique to Botswana and possibly beyond. A rough calculation shows that the original ancient roads would have required over 500 million stones of between 10 and 50 kilograms to construct. If we assume that the roads only make up 2 percent of the ancient settlements, the number of stones required to build the entire ancient city/settlement becomes unthinkable. This is simply not possible with the current model of ancient civilisation in southern Africa. The other issue we need to deal with is the need for roads, since it was previously believed that the wheel only arrived in this part of the world with the Portuguese explorers in the 1400's.

While some archaeological digs have been performed at well publicised locations like Thula Mela, the mistake these explorers make is to stop digging when they find the first layer of remains and artefacts. This is also however the result of political pressure and ignorance from indigenous bantu people from 200 to 400 years ago, who erroneously believe that they were the first inhabitants of these sites, claiming it to be their sacred burial ground or other emotional outbursts. It is unfortunately the political muscle from the current political leadership that dictates our ability to expose the true ancient history of southern Africa. And since our academics at the universities are paid by the government, they are not prepared to bite the hand that feeds them, even if it means they have to promote what seem to be pseudo-science and half-truths. It therefore falls on the shoulders of independent scientists to expose these paramount discoveries.

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