A huge funnel, the walls steep, on its sides runs black lava in the sand of the desert, mixed with emerald green water. If God existed – that would be a look into his workshop: wildly modeled and a hell of a lot of paint spilled in one of the first attempts to create the world in this fiery furnace in the Great Rift Valley.
The thing about the beginning of life is not an exaggeration. It feels metaphysical, at least surreal, to sit here on a boulder and remember something that you couldn’t have experienced. But the place is real, it exists on earth: the Nabayotum crater on Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, which is partly in Ethiopia. It is the largest desert lake in the world, twelve times larger than Lake Constance. Crocodiles swim in its alkaline water, and its banks are a research field for prehistoric life. One of the most important finds was the complete skeleton of a boy who died 1.5 million years ago from an infected baby tooth – evidence for the thesis that the cradle of humanity lay in Africa, right here. Nabayotum crater, center of the world.
Going to this isolated place comes at a price and is dangerous. There is no infrastructure, no roads, nothing. From Nairobi it’s a three-day jeep ride through the desert to the lake. It’s safer to take a helicopter from one of the very few camps in the area. So far away – but it doesn’t get any closer to the beginning of it all.