Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map

by Rick Ridgeway

In a back issue of National Geographic I once found a photograph of a set of fossilized footprints that were discovered on the Laetoli Plains of Tanzania, to the south of the celebrated Olduvai Gorge. They were the prints of upright primates, two adults and one child, walking side by side, made 3.6 million years ago, near the dawn of our emergence as a species. Now, as I walked through the thornbush, I again thought of those footprints in stone. I watched my feet leave prints in the red earth, and I felt a palpable connection. My mind flipped through the generations like calendar pages in a period movie—20,000, 50,000, 100,000 generations—and there was my ancestral family walking across this same thornbush land, with the same savanna trees and only slight variations of the same animals, leaving their prints in the soft mud as they strode bipedally forward in their eternal gait.