Malapa Fossil Site, Cradle of Humankind, Archaeological cave in Gauteng, South Africa

Malapa is an archaeological cave in South Africa's Gauteng province that contains fossil deposits preserved in calcified sediments formed at the bottom of an ancient underground lake. The site sits in a limestone area near Johannesburg that is known for discoveries of human ancestor remains.

In August 2008 Lee Berger's nine-year-old son Matthew found a hominid clavicle at this site, and Berger then spotted a jawbone with a canine tooth. A second partial skeleton, of an adult female, was recovered on 4 September 2008. The remains were named Australopithecus sediba, dated to roughly 1.9 million years ago.

The name sediba in Australopithecus sediba means "natural spring" or "well" in Sotho, the language behind the site's name. The site lies within the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, near Sterkfontein and Swartkrans. The area has been investigated continuously since the first discoveries there in 1935.

Malapa is an active excavation site, not a site open to visitors, so there are no guided tours into the pit. The fossil-bearing deposits lie in a shallow excavation cut into reddish-brown earth, with broken ledges of pale cave rock and sediment around the rim. Researchers reach the site from the Cradle of Humankind area, about 45 km north-northwest of Johannesburg.

The fossils may represent a transitional form between earlier and later human relatives, which changed scientific debate about our evolutionary history. This discovery was so important that it helped shape new theories about how the human line developed.