Tutu's toes saved in time

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Addressing reporters after placing his foot in a wet concrete block, Tutu said on Wednesday: "There is no race which is superior to the other. All of us, including those who are in Europe, deep in our sense, we are all Africans. We belong to one family, which is the family of Ubuntu.

"It is humbling to add my footprint, which is a footprint that takes us back into the past when all people were united by our common ancestor, who was made in the image of God. So as human beings, we belong together. If I want to be human, it can only be in relationship with other people because we are interdependent."

Tutu also took a tour of both the Sterkfontein Caves and Maropeng. He said man's survival would only happen if everyone lived together in peace.

A step into the future, a step in the right direction

With his trademark laughter, Tutu said: "I pray that it is also a step into a future where all people shall be united again by a sense of unity and Ubuntu.

"I know I may not live to see that day, but today I believe that this is a step in the right direction."

Professor Lee Berger, who is recognised the world over for having discovered an entirely new species of hominids in Maropeng in 2008, said although Tutu was not a scientists, but through his fight and campaign against apartheid, he had been clear that all human beings belong to one family from the African continent.

"The Archbishop has been preaching Ubuntu throughout the world from his early age, but as scientists, we only discovered it a while ago that all human beings originated in the African continent," he said.

Berger gave the Nobel Prize Winner a framed photo of the skeleton hand he discovered in Maropeng, which includes the fossil discovered by his son, Matthew, when he was 9 years old.

By imprinting his foot in Maropeng, Tutu joined former President Thabo Mbeki and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who were the first to donate their footprints in 2002.

President Jacob Zuma and Václav Klaus, the former President of the Czech Republic, have left their imprints.

However, the handprint of Nelson Mandela completes the total of national presidents currently represented in Maropeng.

Tutu's other donations

In February 2010, an article was published, which revealed that Tutu had donated some of his own cells to the human genome project to be sequenced as an example for a Bantu individual, representing Sotho-Tswana and Nguni speakers.

The human genome project has demonstrated that all humans originated in Africa, and the Khoi-San people of southern Africa are amongst the oldest surviving races, and implicitly ancestral to all other human species.

It has suggested that the common female ancestor of all living humans (called 'genetic Eve') lived 143 000 years ago, whilst the common male ancestor ('genetic Adam') lived about 59 000 years ago.

This supports the so-called "Out of Africa II" hypothesis, for which there is also extensive palaeoanthropological evidence from the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site and elsewhere in Africa.

The footprints project represents support for the belief that our ancestors walked out of Africa to populate the entire planet.