Cats in the Cradle

They call Tanzania the cradle of humanity. A million or more years ago early man was living it up close to what we now call the Serengeti National Park.

Our ancestors’ bones lie buried in the wrongly named Olduvai Gorge (the Maasi were actually saying oldupai), named not for its prehistoric pies, but for the oldupai plants which grow like massive, spiky aloe vera across the dry valley.

The elements have exposed a vertical time line in the rock; dry brown layers like a Schwarzwaldenkirschtorte. And for 50 odd years modern man has been digging up evidence of life in the layers. Australopithicus afarensis (the same species as the famous Lucy from Ethiopia), Homo habilis and finally our predecessor Homo erectus all lived there. They even left footprints that fossilised in the mud… it was erectus who, appropriately, first walked out of Africa.

Animals were living at Oldupai too, fantastic prehistoric versions of the ones we know today - weird looking horses, giraffes, giant pigs and of course big cats. So humans and lions have coexisted in the Serengeti for thousands if not millions of years.

It was and still is a strange and somewhat tense existence. No doubt those cats were hunting early man until man worked out how to sharpen rocks and thus a method of hunting lions. Later poachers, collectors and colonialists killed for trophies and cash rather than self defence. Maasi tradition still dictates that a man must kill a lion in order to get married; our tour leader Julius killed one, along with a group of other young men, so that he could marry his first wife.

Now lions are protected, instead hunted by tourists shooting with cameras not spears. For me those cats were the highlight of our safari - the lioness, standing on a rocky outcrop with her cubs, looking over the Serengeti (possibly eyeing off dinner: wildebeest on the horizon). And the bold cubs playing - just like Simba - in the Ngorongoro crater (on which the Lion King was based). Majestic cats. Little fluffy ones that could probably bite your hand off. Nice puddy!

Now if I could only get a new song in my head because ‘The Circle of Life’ is really getting tiresome…