Sunday, a day of rest. I plan to spend it visiting the area
around the town of Bishoftu
(in Oromiya language), also know as Debrezeit (in Amharic language), which is
about 50 km to Addis to the east. Being an independent traveler is as unusual
in Ethiopia as it was in Mongolia , so
Getachew assigned his assistant, Nikodemos, to be my guardian angel. Niko is a
very personable young man, who studied communications and is now in charge of
promoting the Bio-Farm concept, and managing the website. I need to stress to
him that he will have to answer the e-mails that Getachew always let go
unanswered.
We started at 8 am sharp, heading east through the city
until we reached the new ring road, and from there connected into the modern superhighway
that was to take us to our destination. In the distance we could see two
condominium cities that were being built from scratch, and which are destined
to house low-income families who will provide the workforce for the new
industrial complex also being built. All this new construction is being
financed by the Chinese, who have now turned to Africa as a source of cheap
labor, just like the US
turned to the Chinese in the 70’s. One more major piece of infrastructure that
is nearly complete is the new fast railroad that will connect Addis with the
port facilities in Djibouti .
The old narrow gage line was built 100 years ago by the French and is already
obsolete and abandoned.
The superhighway brought us down from the highlands unto the
western shoulders of the East African Rift Valley (one of the geologic marvels
of the world), where thick sedimentary sequences host significant groundwater
and geothermal resources. Today’s quest, however, was for yet another type of
geologic wonder: A cluster of 6 or 7 maars formed by phreatomagmatic eruptions.
These types of eruptions take place when hot magma comes in contact with
shallow groundwater to form powerful steam blasts that scoop out the shallow
sediments to form neat circular depressions surrounded by a ring of loose
tephra. In Mexico
these depressions are known by the name of xalapascos
when they are simply a dry depression, or axalapascos
if at the center of them there is a lake (the initial a is derived from the word atl
which means “water”), which is in fact nothing else but the exposed water
table. The maars around Bishoftu include one dry and six with lakes. The
enterprising Ethiopians have developed four of the latter with excellent
resorts that welcome national and international tourists with open arms.
We got back from our nice geologic outing around 2 pm, at
which point Niko turned down my invitation to lunch, under the pretext that he
had things to do. I suspect he didn’t want to impose himself on me, but that
didn’t mean he was giving up his role as guardian angel, because he called me
at about 3 pm to see if I wanted to do something else in the afternoon.
Unbeknownst to him I had already escaped my gilded cage, and his call caught me
just as I was entering the National
Museum
The basement of the National
Museum is a must see for the student
of human evolution, because the East
African East
Valley Ethiopia
has given us a very detailed image of the climatic changes that served as
backdrop for human evolution. 6 Ma ago (mega annum, or million years ago), high
precipitation led to formation of a luscious jungle, where large rivers inhabited
by crocodiles and giant hypos meandered across dense stands of trees, which in
turn served as home to boars the size of cows, tiny primitive horses, and the
first proto-hominids Sahelanthropus
tchadensis from which some of our early ancestors were going to evolve.
Between 5 and 4 Ma ago a new species had evolved, Ardipithecus, who was well adapted to an
arboreal life, but who was also capable of walking in what by then was a
landscape of grasslands dotted with trees. I paid my respect to the human remains
of great-grandmama Ardi, who was probably 1.20 m tall and had delicate features
but extremely long hands (like those of a certain grandson of mine). She shared
her habitat with bovids, short-neck giraffides, a dinotheriums.
A new genus, Australopithecus,
entered the evolutionary scene 3.5 Ma ago, when delicate Dinknesh (also known
as Lucy) walked through what now had become a savannah with numerous lakes.
Dinknesh (The Wonderful One in Amharic) was tiny, barely reaching one meter in
height, fully bipedal, and had a definitely human face. Selam (Peace in
Amharic), could well have been her baby, dead at the tender age of 3. Both
Dinknesh and Selam speak to us through the ages from their sober glass cases at
the museum.
The gracile Australopithecus
afarenis (Dinknesh and Selam) shared their world with their cousins A. robustus and A.boiseai (big boys that would make a Sumo wrestler think twice),
with antelopes, giraffes, elephants, and pigmy hypos, as well as carnivores
such as saber-toothed cats.
And then, 2.4 Ma ago, a newcomer introduced a remarkable
cultural adaptation. Homo habilis
developed the ability of shaping stones into tools to better survive in the
increasingly drier savannah. H. habilis
persisted until 1.8 Ma ago, when a new species, Homo erectus, perfected the art of stone tool making to introduce
what is normally called the Acheluan tradition of bifacial stone axes. The ones
in display at the museum are big, easily the size of a paperback, and in the
hands of a powerful hominid must have been a fearsome tool. H. erectus was, without doubt, one of
the most successful members of the human family. H. erectus spread out of Africa into Europe and Asia, and as late
as 0.5 Ma ago crossed the Malacca Strait to occupy the Indonesian island of Flores
Back in mother Africa three
other human species evolved: Homo sapiens
neanderthalensis (0.4 Ma ago), Homo
sapiens idaltu (0.3 Ma ago), and Homo
sapiens sapiens (0.3 Ma ago). The first and the third species eventually
moved out of Africa into Europe and Asia , and
as it is well know it was H. sapiens
sapiens who survived into the
current era.
I feel in awe after walking the halls of this cathedral to
human evolution.
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