Over the last thirty years or so, it has become increasingly
apparent that Africa is probably the "Cradle of Mankind". From Africa
they spread out to populate the rest of Earth. Remains of the earliest
humans were found in Oldupai Gorge.
Oldupai Gorge (originally misnamed Olduvai) is the most famous
archaeological location in East Africa, and has become an essential
visit for travelers to Ngorongoro or Serengeti.
The Olduvai Gorge Museum and Visitors Center offer numerous educational
exhibits, including fossils and artifacts of our human ancestors and
skeletons of many extinct animals who shared their world. There are also
informative lectures, special guided archaeological sites tours, native
handcrafts and a well-stocked bookshop. See and learn about our
collective human origins when we were once all Africans.
By design or accident, this was the world's most important technological
breakthrough because it helped make us human. Their ability to cut open
the thickest of animal hides and process and consume the nutritious
flesh and bone marrow may have been the metabolic catalyst for increased
brain size and our successful transition from apes to humans.
Similar to modern-day East African lakes, the nearly two million
year-old paleolake Olduvai once teemed with large predators and gigantic
plant-eaters. Clearly our ancestors lived and evolved in a brutal world
where sudden death potentially lurked at every turn. They successfully
competed against such dangerous competitors by seizing an opportunity
created by large carnivores with the aid of a few sharp stones and
refuge trees.
Some 30,000 years ago, splitting of the earth's surface by violent
geological activity and millennial of erosion by seasonally flowing
streams incised the nearly 250 foot (90m) canyon known as Olduvai Gorge.
These natural forces exposed a remarkably rich geological chronicle of
human ancestry and the evolution of the Serengeti ecosystem. It was here
that Mary and Louis Leakey
unearthed the first well-dated artifacts and fossils of some of our
earliest human ancestors after over 30 years of painstaking work.
Tourists at Olduvai Gorge
These crude but effective tools and later stone implements are on
display in the Olduvai Museum. The full, up-to-date story of Laetoli and
Olduvai Gorge and our early ancestors is available in a newly published
booklet available in the Museum book shop.
These include the famous Zinjanthropus (Australopithecus boisei) skull, homo habills, the presumed maker of the numerous early stone tools in the 1.8 to 1.6 million year-old deposits, and homo erectus, the larger bodied, larger brained hominin that preceded the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens).
Photos by UKARIMU
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