Over 80 years have passed since the first Early Miocene fossils were described from "south of Lüderitz", in what was at the time German South West Africa. Over the years more than 4,000 fossils have been collected from the region, of which more than 3400 were collected by the Namibia Palaeontology Expedition between 1993 and 2006. Quite a few of the taxa described by Stromer (1926) and Hopwood (1928) were known from inadequate material, sometimes just a single incomplete jaw, but others were known from articulated skeletons. As is usually the case, the new collections reveal the limitations of the previously available samples, and permit a thorough revision of the faunas. Not unexpectedly, these discoveries have implications for the interpretations of other African Early Miocene faunas, especially those from Kenya and Uganda which have traditionally been compared to those from the Sperrgebiet. It is shown that some of the taxa hitherto considered to be distinct, are in fact synonyms, whereas others thought to be identical are different.