Three billion two hundred million years ago – 109,300,000,000 rotations on our ceaseless journey around the sun – isn’t it interesting that years are still the measurement of time, even in the billions? Anyway, back then Earth was a hot lava ball and it rotated faster than it does now. The sun emitted a paler energy, being just a youngster. The moon clung closer to us then it does today. Meteors and asteroids pelted both orbs. Life was non-existent.

Oxygenation was another billion years away.  Yet there was water and how can that be? Water is one part oxygen. It is an unanswered question; some think H2o arrived by meteor. At any rate water was here and we know this in part because of the amazing rocks laid open on the Genesis Highway, the road to Swaziland. We have reached a pinnacle on our trip – likely these are the very oldest rocks that we will ever see.

Geologists must have lost their collective minds when they came upon what is now known as the Barberton Greenstone Belt. It is beyond ancient, formed only a couple of billion years into our planets’ existence. These quarries of whitish sharp-edged sandstone are the remnants of tidal flats. Tides came and went many times a day, sorting sand and mud endlessly back and forth over pools and small islands. The water reacted with the meager sunlight to create biomats, the first simple life form.

All of this material was eventually buried by granite floating up from the magma, and the years kept going by. The granite decomposed. A highway was built. Scientists came and erected interpretive signage. Evidence of the most primordial life, the biomats, are clearly visible in the rocks. On undiscovered distant planets, biomats will qualify as a life form. Biomats are far more likely to exist than little green men. But I’d be impressed with either.

We traveled the Genesis Highway to Swaziland to experience that country’s monumental effort to protect their white and black rhinos. Everyone we met was optimistic and of course thrilled to have rhinos for us to see. Rhinos are massive; stepping onto the track in front of us, they surprised us more than once.  Did you know that the female white rhino sharpens her horn on rocks? Her horn can grow to be a meter long, and look how sharp it is. The two species, black and white, evolved to look the same but they eat entirely different diets. The white rhino eats by mowing the grasses they favor with a wide mouth. The black rhino, with its beak-shaped mouth, eats twigs and sticks. They both excrete enormous piles of waste which they then spread around to mark territory. And by the way, that fantasy about the elephant ivory? It applies to rhinos and their horns as well, and tigers and all the other exploited creatures on this fantastically old planet.