A steep-sided ravine about 48 kilometres long cutting 90 metres down through the bed of an old lake, on the eastern Serengeti plains inside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania. Ash from the volcanoes Olmoti and Kerimasi sealed each layer as it was laid down, which is why the record here is so good. Mary and Louis Leakey ran excavations from the 1930s onward and turned the gorge into the place where the story of early tool use was written, with the oldest stone industries taking their name, Oldowan, from this ground. The Maasai word oldupai means the place of the wild sisal, which grows all through the gorge. A side gorge running in from Lemagrut follows the shoreline of the prehistoric lake and is the richest part of the whole system. It is a registered National Historic Site of Tanzania with a museum on the rim.
Early hominins, stone tools and Pleistocene plains animals · Pliocene to Pleistocene
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Kenya
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