The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

Where the World Began: Ngorongoro, Tanzania

But nothing is as remarkable as the footprints, the earliest imprint of our kind on this planet. About 3.7 million years ago, two or three early hominids walked upright across this gorge through soft volcanic ash. They marched more or less in line, following so closely that one often stepped into the footprints of the one ahead. When the ash hardened to rock, the interweaving footprints were preserved; the remarkable plaster casts can be seen in the little museum above the gorge. I first saw them twenty years ago and they have haunted me ever since. The footprints, so individual, prompt a rush of questions. Not the big academic ones about their stage in the development of Homo sapiens, but the smaller, more personal ones. What was the relationship between these three, and where were they heading? Perhaps they were on their way to water in the late afternoon, the time of day when animals drifted across the gorge towards a water hole. We can never know the answers, of course, but for a moment, contemplating that track of small interwoven footprints, I felt a connection to some of our earliest ancestors, across almost four million years. ~~ On that morning at Entamanu, in the earliest light, I walked with my guide along the rim of Ngorongoro past strutting ostriches and solitary Maasai stepping in and out of clouds. As we turned down the old track leading into the caldera, I saw great provinces of light and shadow gliding over the crater floor far below. Scanning the grassland with binoculars, I spotted a pair of lions padding slowly towards a water hole. Surrounded by steep escarpment walls, Ngorongoro’s caldera, more than 7 miles across and 1900 feet deep, contains one of Africa’s richest concentrations of game—an enclosed Eden of grass and animals. Humanity has been banished from this place for several generations, and the density of wildlife here can hardly be exaggerated.

To the great writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, the Crater Highlands were “the most beautiful of all the regions that I have seen in Africa.” To the Maasai, this is God’s country; the Almighty himself lives here, a useful, if occasionally troublesome, neighbor. Extinct volcanos dominate the highlands, marching northwards towards sulfurous Lake Natron: Oldeani, Lemagrut, Ngorongoro, Olmoti, Loolmalasin, and Embagai. The Maasai god Ngai lives on the last and most beautiful of these: Ol Doinyo Lengai. Its silhouette is like a child’s drawing of a mountain—solitary, pointed, symmetrical—the blue of its flanks running over the lines to merge with the sky. Alone of these volcanoes, Ol Doinyo Lengai is still active. When God is displeased with his people, he blows his top; the eruptions can blight the pasture for miles around. When he is pleased, he sends the Maasai rain and children. Some years ago, I walked across these highlands, a week’s trek from Ngorongoro to Lake Natron on the Kenyan border, with two Maasai warriors—fine fellows, but appalling cooks—and a couple of dogged baggage donkeys. My return this time felt like a kind of homecoming. It is a common feeling, even for those who have never been here before, for this is where humanity was born. Away to the west lies Olduvai Gorge, where Mary and Louis Leakey first came in the 1930s looking for evidence of our earliest ancestors. Some 30 miles long and 300 feet deep in places, Olduvai is a cavernous ravine between steep escarpments where layers of volcanic ash from the highland volcanoes have been laid down over millions of years. The gorge is really an enormous book about early life on Earth. From time to time, earthquakes, floods, or simple erosion disturb the binding and another page falls open: the fossils of an extinct three-toed horse, the bones of dinosaurs, stone tools used by hominids, a jaw fragment of a Homo habilis.

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