Oldupai Gorge

On our way to Ngorongoro Crater, we stopped to visit Oldupai Gorge, the site where Louis and Mary Leakey did their archaeological dig work.  

Gouged into the edge of the Salei Plains is Oldupai (or Olduvai) Gorge, a steep-sided, 48km-long ravine whose depth reaches 150m in places. Furrowed out of the volcanic land by the capricious Oldupai River, the rock strata on either side of the gorge have exposed the fossilized remains of animals and over fifty hominids dating back almost two million years, and – when taken together with finds from Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa – comprise an archeological trove of inestimable importance for understanding the origins of humankind.

The fossils were first noted in 1911 by Professor Kattwinkel, a German butterfly collector, who stumbled across them quite by chance, and took the fossilized remains of a three-toed horse back to Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde. Two decades later, his findings aroused the curiosity of a Kenyan-born British anthropologist, Louis Leakey, whose name now features in almost any discussion on human prehistory. In 1931, inspired by nothing more than a gut feeling that Africa was the "cradle of mankind", Leakey began excavating at Oldupai Gorge.

For almost thirty years, Louis and his wife, Mary, found only stone tools, the oldest belonging to the so-called Oldowan industry (1.2 to 1.8 million years ago). Spurred on by the belief that the remains of the hominids that had created the tools could not be far behind, they persevered, and their patience was finally rewarded in 1959 by the discovery of two large human-like teeth and a piece of skull. Further digging provided over four hundred additional fragments, which were painstakingly reassembled to form the 1.75 million year-old skull of Australopithecus boisei ("southern ape"), nicknamed Nutcracker Man on account of his powerful jaws. The tool-maker had been found, and the discovery – at the time, the oldest known – provoked a sea-change in paleontological circles, especially as the skull's size and dentition displayed uncanny similarities with modern man. The unavoidable conclusion was that the Leakeys had unearthed a direct ancestor of modern man, and in fact that the much vaunted "missing link" had been found.

The theory was accepted until disproved by much older finds from Ethiopia, and from Laetoli south of Oldupai, and since then poor old Nutcracker Man has been consigned to history as an evolutionary dead end. His importance remains, however, in showing that hominid evolution was not a simple linear progression. The find also spurred on a flurry of further excavations at Oldupai, which showed conclusively that two other hominid species, almost certainly our ancestors, lived contemporaneously with Nutcracker Man – Homo habilis ("handy man") and Homo erectus ("upright man").

Over the years, various claims have been made for one place or another being the "cradle of mankind", but it's way too early to say this with any certainty (indeed, a recent find of seven-million-year-old hominid fossils in Chad makes the East African fossils look positively juvenile, though the dating is disputed), and of course fossil beds are usually revealed by geological chance, which in East Africa was the Rift Valley. What is certain, however, is that the incredible journey into our prehistory first began to make sense at Oldupai, and it's a journey that, if it can be traced at all, should happily continue to baffle humankind for many years to come.

(from roughguides.com)

It was an interesting little museum but quite mysteriously, the pictures I took seem to have disappeared between here and there.  I know Sandra took lots so I'll have to dip into her images and find some. 

The museum was in two rooms and was definitely a tiny little  place considering the significance of this place.  My favourite part was the story of a Japanese man who decided to trace the path of human development and cycled from his home in Japan to Oldupai Gorge, over 2 years.  It was fascinating - and I can't find a single online link to it - sorry!