The Dankalia region of Ethiopia is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. It is, for the most part, wanting of flora and fauna and presents to the eye alternating scenes of desert flatlands and isolated mountain groups, sometimes interrupted by valleys mottled with thorny acacias. Goats roam in bands cropping the bristly stems of short grasses and kicking up loose dirt into little churning dust storms.
Moving inland, toward the Ethiopian highlands, a long depression extends itself reaching a depth of 120 meters below sea level. This section is one of the lowest and hottest places on earth and is known as Dallol (Danakil depression), where temperatures in the sun can reach 145°F (50°C).
The Danakil depression is an area along the Great Rift Valley (the cradle of mankind) where the earth’s crust is being stretched and thinned like sheets of heated plastic and the land has sunk, over much time, to a current depth of 371 feet below sea level. This is one of the lowest points on earth. Here the earth’s crust is so thin that new land is constantly being created by new lava jets that ooze upward. Water also seeps down, to be ejected back out again as angry steam bursts. Volcanic cones are an enchanting and common visual sight, as are deep cracks that line the earth. To be here is to feel the birth pains of the young earth many billions of years hence.
10,000 years ago the Danakil desert was part of the Red Sea when the earth’s crust collapsed and water flooded in. Many believe this localised geological event to be the origin of the Biblical Noah's flood story. This flood water; subjected for many years to a blazing sun, gradually evaporated leaving behind enormous salt pans and salt lakes. Lakes so salty that the density of the water is greater than the density of the human body - enabling one to float without paddling.
The people living in the Afar region; a crumbling waste of brittle rock and broken lava flows are as tough and hostile as their environment. The Afar people are largely nomads and almost entirely Muslim by faith. It is here that some of the oldest humanoid fossils have been found, linking our ancestral tree's roots, firmly and suredly, in a African setting. A million years back we are all Africans.
