The Time Machine...

(Unfortunately, we wound up with only a couple of good pictures from this stop, so I'll try to fill in the blanks with links to external sources.)

After we left Crater Lodge at Ngorongoro, we were off to Oldupai Gorge, where Mary and Louis Leakey found the hominid fossils that gave rise to the widely-accepted theory that humanity was born in Africa. Many people think that the correct spelling is Olduvai, but this is a misspelling of Oldupai, the Maasai name for a species of wild sisal that grows in the area. The road from Ngorongoro to Oldupai is dirt and gravel, and very rough and rutted. Though only about 25 miles, the trip took a couple of hours.

Soon enough we arrived at a small visitor's center complete with a museum and gift shop. There isn't a lot to see at Oldupai. One half of the museum is dedicated to the Laetoli footprints, and the other to the explorations of the Leakeys. There is also an outdoor seating area where interpretive talks are given several times during the day. We arrived near lunchtime, so we broke out the bush boxes and ate while waiting for the next talk.

We had some visitors during lunch: a small flock of White Bellied Canaries looking for handouts.

We also had a spectacular view into the Gorge, including the famous monolith that is frequently pictured in articles about the site.











Soon, our interpretive guide showed up and spent about 20 minutes talking about the area, starting with the source of the name Oldupai (the Maasai word for a local sisal plant, as mentioned earlier), continuing with a description of the geologic stratiagraphy of the area, and ending with a discussion of the Leakeys, their discoveries, and the hardships they endured.

There are seven distinct archeological beds in the gorge. Bed I, the deepest and oldest, was laid down about 1.8 million years ago. This was where Mary Leakey made her discovery of Zinjanthropus, now known as Paranthropus Boisei. This link will take you to a short video of the site, posted to Vimeo by Don Johanson of the Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins. Unfortunately, only the concrete foundation of the monument was present when we visited after the lecture and before we struck out for Ndutu; the monument and plaques are missing. Whether this is due to vandalism, theft, or some other reason is unknown. The relationship of the site to the visitor's center can be seen at this Google Maps link. The visitors center is the small blue-roofed building at the bottom. If you zoom in to the white area in the extreme upper left corner you will see an obvious right angle - the legs of the angle are the walls of Mary Leakey's excavation of Zinjanthropus.

Beds II-VII have yielded much archeological and anthropological data as well, essentially describing the progression of humanity's ancestors at this site for the last 1.8 million years. For most of this period, the Oldupai region was relatively wet, and it is believed that the area was frequently either lakeshore or riverine, both of which would guarantee a good living for primitive hunter-gatherers.

The Leakeys and their team endured considerable hardship during their 60 years of visits to Oldupai, which started in 1935. The site is remote now: imagine how remote it must have been in the late 1930s. Once they arrived, and until the permanent camps were established, it was not uncommon to sleep in the vehicles at night for protection against wild animals. Nonetheless, great discoveries were made at the Gorge for many years.

In 1976, some 30 miles south of the Oldupai site, Mary Leakey made perhaps her most amazing discovery: the Laetoli hominid footprints. The footprints, shown in this Encarta article, date to 3.6 million years ago and show three upright-walking individuals: two (large and medium sized tracks) walking side-by side and a third (small, possibly a child) walking step-for-step in the larger individuals footsteps (the small tracks leading to the right are animal prints). A cast of the footprints, which were preserved in wet ash after being covered by more ash, can be viewed in the Oldupai museum. The location of the original site, however, is not widely known, and the excavation has been backfilled with dirt and covered in stones to protect it.

In some ways, I found the visit to Oldupai a little bit of a letdown at the time, although I'm not sure what I expected. I didn't do as much advance research as I should have. Now that I am home and have had time to do some targeted reading and relive the experience in memory and pictures, I have a far greater appreciation of our brief visit. The stillness and quiet of the gorge bottom vibrates with the deepness of time and human history. It should - this, or someplace like it - is where we all began.