MORE INFORMATION AND PICTURE

OLDUVAI GORGE

Visitors now see Olduvai George ( Also known as Oldupai, the Maasai spelling of the name ) as a dry shallow canyon draining wet season run off from lakes Ndutu and Masek to the Olbalbal depression. However severally million years ago the entire area was a vast alkaline Lake. The wildly fluctuating waters of this ancient lake formed the definitive sediment layers that have yielded a valuable pale anthropological and  archaeological record. In the seventy years since Louis and Mary  Leakey fast began searching the area for clues to our distant past more than sixty hominids, showing the gradual increase in brain size and the most famous of these discoveries was made  by Mary Leakey an is the well known “ ZINJANTHROPUS”  At Laetoli hominid footprints are preserved in Volcanic Rock some 3.6 million years old and the  represent same of the earliest signs of the small brained, upright-walking Australopithecus aphaeresis ever to be found. Imprints are among the fascinating exhibits in the museum at Olduvai George. Excavations are on going and continue to produce splendid specimens of extinct hominids animal and plants. The museum at Olduvai George provides excellent exhibits, lectures and its location tours of the area which is also a birders paradise can be arranged.

SHIFTING SANDS

Just a few kilometers from the museums of Olduvai Gorge  is the bizarre phenomenon known as shifting sands. There are two of these insolated sands dunes which migrate slowly around the flat lands of olduvai areas with the wind. Their incredible fine black volcanic sands is permanently on the move. The surfaces of the dunes constantly blowing and sliding. Year markers give some kind of idea of the movement of the dunes, which seems to be in the order of fifty meter per year.