The discovery of alluvial diamonds in Namibia in 1908 not only sparked off over a century of exploitation of the richest and most areally extensive diamond placers ever recognised, but it also set in motion the inquisitive minds of scientists who have laboured to understand the processes that led to the formation of the placers. Within a year of the initial discovery, geologists such as Merensky (1909) and Krause (1910) had proposed a source (or sources) for the diamonds, had suggested transport pathways from source to sink, and had investigated concentration mechanisms as well as estimated the timing of some of the geological events in the region. A few of the early ideas, such as the supposed presence of Cretaceous rocks in the region, were poorly supported by evidence, in this case being based on mis-identified marine molluscs (Merensky, 1909) of Late Eocene age.