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The area on the northern edge of a farm owned by Billy Bolt, for whom the site is named, was first used as a speleothem quarry during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Miners harvested this speleothem for use in lime production. This process unearthed fossil deposits, which were first sampled and examined by palaeontologist Robert Broom during a 1936 expedition to Transvaal. Broom named many of the fossil taxa recovered from the site.[8] In 1947 and 1948, a team of researchers from the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) led by palaeontologists Frank Peabody and Charles Lewis Camp, called the University of California Africa Expedition, began exploring palaeontological sites across eastern and southern Africa. A team of the southern branch of the expedition led by Peabody was responsible for the first excavation at Bolt's Farm.[5] The mining had created rubble chunks containing fossiliferous breccia; early investigations retrieved material from this rubble, instead of mining it in situ. Additionally, the UCMP excavations were centred on the main quarry. Multiple smaller excavations have been completed in the decades since. Historically, Bolt's Farm has been ignored for sites where hominid fossils have already been discovered, which are of much more interest to archaeologists; thus, the study of the site has lagged behind that of its neighbors like Sterkfontein.[1][2]
Other species represented in the Bolt's Farm fossil deposits are Antidorcas recki, Ictonyx bolti, Metridiochoerus andrewsi,[14] Euryotomys bolti, Elephantulus antiquus,[15] Boltimys broomi,[9] and Proteles cristatus.[16] Bolt's Farm has yielded some of the best specimens of Plio-Pleistocene big cats in South Africa, including a complete skull and jaw of the saber-toothed cat Dinofelis barlowi.[12] The first fossil remains of a snake belonging to the family Elapidae recovered from southern Africa were collected from Bolt's Farm in 2009.[17] The 2016 discovery at Bolt's Farm of the first fossil Agama lizard recovered from the Cradle of Humankind was announced in 2020.[18]