It is a wild and rugged place — hot, dry, uninhabited most of the year and then only by wandering Masai herdsmen tending their ragged cattle.

It is called Olorgesailie and it is 100 miles south of the Equator on the floor of Kenya's Rift Valley, where the earth's crust cracked open millions of years ago. Ever since, earthquakes have tossed the still widening and subsiding valley floor into a wrinkled and broken landscape.

From the traffic jams and high-rise office buildings of downtown Nairobi it is just five miles to the Pleistocene age of mammals. On the outskirts of this burgeoning metropolis of nearly 600,000 there remains a remarkable concentration of wildlife, the like of which has not been seen in most of the world for thousands of years.

Probably no other controversy has done more to divide the ranks of conservationists around the world or more to cripple ecological research in East Africa than that involving the elephants of Tsavo.

Out here in a remote corner of Ethiopia, under the burning African sun, they are learning what the world was like when man was born. Near the banks of the ancient Omo River, unlike any other place in the world, uplifting of the earth’s crust and subsequent erosion has fanned out the layers of geologic history so that it is possible to walk in a day through three million years of human evolution - the critical span from about 1. 5 million years ago to nearly 4.5 million years ago.

As readers of Robert Ardrey' s African Genesis may recall, the first solid suggestion that man originated in Africa came in the 1920s when Raymond Dart painstakingly chiseled the fossilized skull of a pre-human child from a block of South African limestone.

It is 5:30 in the morning and, looking east, I can see the darkness lifting over the distant rim of the wide Ngorongoro Crater. The hyenas have stopped whooping in the gorge — Olduvai Gorge — that falls away at my feet. The wind whistles through thorn bushes along my edge of this great ravine.

Perhaps the best known and most enduring single feature of East Africa is the massive, snow crested mound of Kilimanjaro, rising through the clouds to over 19,000 feet.

Thirteen years ago Robert Ardrey published his African Genesis, popularizing Raymond Dart’s old theory that man evolved from a "killer ape" whose murderous instincts remain deeply ingrained in us, despite a veneer of civility.

From the road that runs over nearby hills one can look out over Kenya's Lake Nakuru and see a ribbon of pink fringing virtually the entire shoreline. The "pink" is all you can see from that distance of the hundreds of thousands — sometimes over a million — flamingoes that live in this remarkable lake habitat.

On this barren, crocodile-infested spit of sand that juts into Kenya's remote Lake Rudolf stands the base camp of the most successful early-man fossil-hunting expedition ever mounted. From the semi-permanent grass-roofed huts clustered on the point to catch lake breezes, Richard Leakey and a team of scientists that sometimes swells to two dozen range out over a thousand square miles of hot, hilly thorn-bush country to collect the fossilized bones of various ancestors and cousins of the human species.

Judy Rensberger

In 1952 Helen Suzman seemed a poor bet to become South Africa's most vilified and yet most internationally admired politician. She was young and pretty, rich and social, and the golf-playing wife of a Johannesburg doctor.