It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.

It occurred to me that if I did not handle the crash correctly, there would be no survivors.

It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.

We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.

To have arrived on this earth as a product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony.

It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads.

Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn't like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place.