If you’ve ever had the opportunity to travel to northern Botswana and stand in the Kalahari Desert’s Makgadikgadi Pan(s), then you’ll know how difficult it is to imagine that this hot and dry and seemingly endless land was once occupied by a vast inland lake system, and that when that system began to break down, it was for hundreds of thousands of years a rich and gigantic wetland, home to unusually diverse flora and fauna, and so too, it is posited, to some of the earliest modern humans.
Overtaxed imaginations, of course, are somewhat mitigated by our knowledge and experience of neighbouring Okavango Delta, which gives some indication of what this prehistoric wetland might have looked like. And not just by the Delta, for after the rains, as those who have spent time here well know, the desert is briefly and mightily transformed, the pans filling with water, the ‘dead’ trees turning a luminous green, grass growing where once there was only pale soil, the air filled with the trilling of millions of insects, resident desert specialists – brown hyena, meerkat, aardwolf – suddenly joined by flocks of flamingo, large herds of gemsbok, springbok, zebra and wildebeest, and blocks of roaming predators, lion included.
The secrets of our part in this very long-ago past lie in the hands (and DNA) and practices of its indigenous peoples, the Khoisan or Bushmen of the Kalahari. Research using mitochondrial DNA samples taken from living descendants suggest that what is known as the Makgadikgadi-Okavango Wetlands was home to some of the very first modern humans, some of whom would eventually, between 100,000 and 130,000 years ago, migrate southwest and northeast as the climate changed, fanning out, occupying new territories, diversifying genetic stock, and growing in size. While the majority of experts disagree with the claim that this shimmering, apparently empty, and often blindingly white land is the cradle of humankind, there is little doubt that we humans have been here just about as long as we have elsewhere.
To experience this most ancient of lands is to experience a journey not only into the depths of humankind’s past, but also into an extraordinary present, one that is full of surprise and wonder, and leaves us wiser for it.
