Background - A Short Safari Adventure Among Africa's Thorny Bushveld Wildlife - page 1

Chapter 1: Background
Geology and Homo Species, Enigmas, Terrible Twelve and Disease:
Welcome to our travels in an enigmatic dream world. Our passion is for this enigmatic
Southern Africa world containing an astounding genetic diversity of wildlife, microorganisms,
vegetation and a primitive ecosystem that needs preservation to sustain mankind. This Manger
of Mankind is lined by grass fields, speckled with gold, diamonds and platinum, its rim the
oldest mountains on earth, drifting on a boiling hot iron sub-mantle cauldron. Man's early
Manger is the formerly inland sea basin of the first known continent called the Kaapvaal
craton. The base of this floating plate was penetrated by magma from volcanoes that formed
granite pipes, and if in contact with carbon, kimberlitic pipes, in which diamonds were
formed. Magma fields of flowing lava caped the mountains with basalt and later erosion
washed the mountains towards the inland sea, with the sediment forming a rich seam only a
few feet thick of the gold bearing conglomerate. The eastern mountain craton rim of the
Barberton Greenstone Complex supposedly dates back 3.6 billion years and is punctuated by
stromatolites rocks said to contain the earliest forms of life, namely cyanobacteria that turned
noxious ferment fumes into oxygen. Later, Australopithecus bipeds and Homo species
scavengers and hunter-gatherers, capable of interbreeding, battled predators and hunted
wildlife on these grassy plains. This Manger was also the early food trough for Mankind and
may still become again.
Perhaps controversies about man's genealogy (deduced timelines of different origins) are
foolish and unprofitable, as expressed to the people of Crete (Titus), living just south of the
Santorini volcano that decimated their legendary Atlantis when the cauldron exploded. Yet,
this past is an enigma we cannot fathom or understand clearly at this time, for we see darkly.
Why is it that geology, archaeology, climatology, paleoanthropology, Eve's DNA, Y-
chromosome data, linguistic analysis, mathematics, statistics, cell biology, Archbishop Ussher,
and other genealogies originate from different time eras create vastly different supposed
answers? Just as this paradox exists, Southern Africa is a place of enigmas; a place where
extremes in geology, beauty, nature, violence, life, and death have ominous overtones.
Trekking Africa's early morning sunlit, dew - drop speckled sparkling ancient plains, humming
with insects and birds, perfumed by the aroma of rich vegetation, alive with the glee of
survivors of the night's predators, with the promise of the new day, is an enthralling journey of
discovery and adventure; Africa's animals of lengthening shadows and darkness are ominous
with the promise of teeming envious eyes, long teeth or horns, of the Terrible Twelve, seeking
the life of intruders, the weaker, or the blood of the slow, to feed off.
On the Barberton Greenstone Complex mountain range, named after green minerals such as
verdite and serpentine that are used in souvenirs, there is a peaked dome appropriately called
Kamhlabane, meaning either “of the earth” or “place of killing.” Battered by the earliest known
asteroid to cause volcanic activity (and may even have delivered gold from a supernova), and
eons of lightening and cyclonic like hurricanes, Kamhlabane looks east to the Lebombo (“big