The Mpumalanga stone circles and Bokoni

What the evidence shows

Stone-walled ruins cover the Mpumalanga escarpment from Ohrigstad to Carolina, more than 10,000 square kilometres of homesteads, terraced fields and connecting roads (SAHO). Oral traditions recorded in the early 20th century call this country Bokoni, the land of the Koni people.

The historian Peter Delius and the archaeologists Tim Maggs and Alex Schoeman studied the sites for years and published Forgotten World: The Stone-Walled Settlements of the Mpumalanga Escarpment (Wits University Press). Homes and livestock sat inside high circular walls. Stone markers divided each household's fields, terraces held crops on the slopes, and walled tracks led cattle to grazing and water without trampling the grain (Mail & Guardian). The people grew sorghum, millet, beans and groundnuts, kept cattle, goats and sheep, and smelted iron and copper (SAHO).

In 2021, Ruby-Anne Birin, Schoeman and Mary Evans dated two homesteads at Komati Gorge using optically stimulated luminescence, which measures when sand grains were last exposed to light. The older homestead was lived in from as early as 1489 CE to about 1577; the younger from about 1682 to 1765. The settlements were largely abandoned by the 1830s, as people joined other chiefdoms or mission stations.

Who says more, and why

Michael Tellinger, a South African author, argues that these ruins are far older than archaeologists say. In a 2011 interview he dated some to about 200,000 years ago and said an ancient southern African civilization passed its knowledge to the Sumerians and Egyptians. His book Slave Species of the Gods identifies the ruins as the city of Enki, built by the Anunnaki, who in his account came to Earth to mine gold and created humans as their workforce. He presents the stone circle near Kaapsehoop known as "Adam's Calendar" as an ancient astronomical site, and his followers describe the circles as energy-generating structures.

Part of the appeal is real: for decades, historians dismissed the ruins as "cattle kraals of little historic importance" (Sowetan), and Tellinger's account at least treats them as remarkable.

What critics say

The luminescence dates, the pottery and the layout of the homesteads all point to farming communities of the last 500 years, not to anything 200,000 years old. The oldest known fossils of our own species are only about 300,000 years old. The writer Glen Retief notes that the energy claims rest on no experimental evidence, and he argues that preferring "flamboyant explanations" over the record of African farming, mining and trading skill repeats colonial thinking (Daily Maverick, 2021). Schoeman's team says their dates "disrupt past narratives" that denied the presence and ability of African farmers before colonisation.

Our assessment: contradicted. The stone-walled settlements were built by Africans and date from about the 15th to the early 19th century CE. The "Adam's Calendar" stones themselves have not been dated in the studies cited here, but no evidence supports an age of 200,000 years or an Anunnaki origin.