Olduvai Gorge
A ravine in Tanzania cuts through two million years of hominin history, layer by layer.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.2 million years
- Known to
- ± 100 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
A river has cut a 90-metre gorge through a stack of lake beds and volcanic ash in the Serengeti, exposing a continuous sequence from before 1.9 million years ago to the recent past. Louis and Mary Leakey worked it for decades, and their finds — Zinjanthropus in 1959, Homo habilis in the 1960s — did more than any other single site to establish that human origins lay in Africa and to attract sustained funding for the search. The Oldowan toolkit is named after it.