South African cave pebble outshines treasures at British Museum

In a corner of the British Museum's new South African exhibition, near an ancient golden rhino and a collection of apartheid-era campaign badges, sits a glass case holding a pitted, reddish-brown stone. It is the Makapansgat pebble, on display for the first time in its three-million-year history, curators reckon - an object that, in its own way, outshines the other treasures in the museum's halls. Experts theorise a very early ancestor of humans, Australopithecus africanus, picked up the pebble