9
Aksum, Ethiopia. 8.16AM
As the small plane banked towards the town sitting at the base of the mountains, Natasha caught a glimpse of low-slung buildings, dusty grey-green against the landscape. A land of fable, she thought. Her father had told her stories of when Ethiopia had been a powerful civilization, although most had forgotten that now. He had taken antiquities from the area, with hardly any difficulty since it was a place forever underestimated and misunderstood by the West. Yet Ethiopia was most likely the cradle of civilization.
Here were found the fossilized remains of ‘Lucy’, the earliest upright walking hominid dated at over 3.5 million years old and the earliest known stone tools were also discovered in this area. The West only remembered the images of skeletal children b
