From South Georgia to South Africa

From South GA to Africa: Lifelong Search for My Roots

 I originally wrote about my interest in family origins beginning with the Genogram I was asked to write about while in pastoral psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. Maybe I was wrong about when my my interest in prehistoric humans began. Maybe it began before the family genogram in 1992. Maybe it began when I used to search the plowed fields of South Georgia for arrowheads( such as these in the pic below.) The center arrowhead I found in 1972. It was lodged in an uprooted tree stump on the edge of a river. I will never forget the feeling of seeing it sticking out from the roots of that fallen tree. I later learned it was from a Native American Tribe that lived in the area around 3000 BC. They were us-- homosapiens. They had traveled Out of Africa in 70,000 BC to Northern Russia and across the Bering Straight to America around 20,000 BC, and into my State of Georgia by about 5000 BC. Little did I know that when I was looking for arrowheads in the fields of Georgia that Lee Berger Phd, now the Director of the Department of Human Evolution at Wits University in Johannesburg South Africa, was doing the same. And in GA!! One reason I wanted to visit the fossil vault at Wits is because I knew Berger and I shared this same experience. I was 19 years old when I found this ancient Native American artifact. I believe the journey started then.