Permit Application for Destructive Sampling and Analysis of the Hanging Remnant Stratigraphic Unit at Swartkrans Cave, South Africa

The Member 1 sedimentary infill at Swartkrans is comprised of two, chronologically distinct units, the Lower Bank and the Hanging Remnant (HR). The HR deposit has been suggested as being younger than the Lower Bank, although attempts at dating it have either relied on inferences from faunal assemblages or bounding flowstones (see Pickering et al. 2011). Recently, Kuman et al. (2021) have used cosmogenic nuclide dating to produce an age for the Lower Bank at ~2.2 Ma, which is coherent with past uranium series and cosmogenic dating results (Pickering et al. 2011; Gibbon et al. 2009). To build upon our chronological research of the Member 1 sedimentary unit, we proposed to use previously collected samples (permit# 2598) of natural chert and quartz clasts (non-artefactual), along with breccia debris to date the HR. Results will test the hypothesis that the HR is in fact younger than the Lower Bank and provide much needed insight into the accumulation history of the Member 1 infill at Swartkrans.