E know beyond a shadow of a doubt that King Arthur exists and is a direct descendant or King Alfred.1/20/2024 I crouch down to examine the bone more closely. Placing one foot squarely on each side of the ridge crest, I notice a glint of white - a fossil bone, weathering out of the soil between my feet. Taking the picture, I look down the slope of concrete-hard pebbles, each one a worn, dried fragment of calcareous ooze deposited at the bottom of a river that flowed here around 3.3 million years ago. The result will be disappointing, failing to capture the stillness, the growing heat of the morning, and the cool relief offered by the gentle breeze that met me as I scaled the ridge, as steep and slippery as a pitched roof. Further away still, beyond the river, the acacias, now too small to make out individually, thin out into a piebald jumble To get smaller and closer together as they converge on the dense, grey-green line of the riverbank. The ground is patterned by small thorn bushes and dotted with acacias, all with the same flat tops, as if a glass sheet covers the scene just fifteen feet from the ground. Tussocks of grass punctuate the red-grey earth. I am in East Africa, more preciselyĪ part of northwestern Kenya, the valley of an ephemeral river called the Topernawi that drains - if such a word applies to a river of sand - into Lake Turkana, at a point some twenty kilometres southeast Mazes of badlands fall away before my gaze dry gullies opening just a few feet away spread out, broaden, and meander into a yellow-green landscape. I climb to the top of the ridge to get a better look at the view. ![]() Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare ![]() Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life
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