Think of the Ngorongoro Crater as hyper-condensed action, like bringing all the best in safari to boil. Here everything bubbles closer, tighter, and louder. Peer inside this primordial caldera and what you see is a petri dish density of wildlife, more predator-prey interactions per capita than almost anywhere on the planet. Amazingly, human footprints have also been discovered in and around Ngorongoro as far back as 2-3 million years ago. Following these earliest scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, Mbulu pastoralists would arrive on the scene followed by the Datooga, and most recently, the Maasai. The first European explorers came to the crater in 1892, and a few decades later Ngorongoro saw its first waves of foreign travelers. Deemed a fragile zone of biodiversity, the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area was established in 1959 and, by 1979, it was protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area sees over a half million annual visitors.