July19 Oldupai Gorge and onward...

 

We spent one more night at the lovely Ngorngoro farm house...

Dad and I are thrilled at our large room with its expansive back verandah (ideal for Yoga!) that opens into the evening sun spilling on coffee beans, birds and flowers. Last evening we gently inquired to find that the brick fireplace can be fired up on demand...and demand we did! The bathroom has hot running water to sooth our sore jeep-bounced muscles and backs from the earlier game drive. Last night we rolled into dinner and Fern looked woefully tired and slow. Even as he sat at dinner he was quiet, sleepy and lethargic. Over the next hour or two his blood sugar took a diabetic tumble down to a low that left him dizzy and us worried. Good fortune had arranged for us to have a triage nurse, 3 doctors and a pharmacist in the group all of whom pitched in to pump sugar into his system and bring him back to normal. However by then he had done serious damage to the credibility of his morning's mantra, "Lunch is overrated, I didn't come all this way to eat"!! It took a little of the next day for Fern to get back on his A-game and continue hitting the trigger on his fully automatic assault camera (14 clicks per second! do we really need this???)

This morning we drive to the Oldupai Gorge where the earliest humanoids fossils were found...a part of the rift valley where humanity first emerged.


 

Visiting a relative

Here at the birthplace of human life…the rift valley of Central Africa we sit on the precipice of a gorge. Down into the gorge cut by a river is ‘Time’, layered liike lasagna. The bottom layer toasted and burnt at the bottom of the pan and deposited when the craters spewed ash is 1.7million years old. It is black in a gun-metal sort of color and shiny with a granite-like dignity. Solid stuff like the rock that Manhattan is built on. It houses the friends and family of ‘lucy’ the earliest humanoid skeleton ever to be found. I wonder what she might have been doing that day when the mountains opened up. Or was she already dead before the eruption and reburied now by time and lava? If she was taken alive by the mountain, did she have time to panic and reach for her kids and things? What did she feel about her ‘early humanoid’ life? Some things we will never know because thoughts and words aren’t fossilized.  (not yet but a Facebook history just might serve as the record)

Let me ask then... in a parallel warp of our days, if the words we say to each other and the feelings we conceal for each other were to be fossilized and museum-zed, how would we be seen by future generations a million years from now?  Is it possible that along with learning about the evolution of our physical  humanoid brain from say 500cc to 900cc over the million years, future humans would also learn about the state of our relationships, our conduct in them and the chemistries that existed between the peoples of the world? What then would they think of us … if our volcanoes erupted today and buried us intact, emotions and all?