Summary

Olduvai Gorge, or Oldupai Gorge, in Tanzania is one of the most important paleoanthropological sites in the world; it has proven invaluable in furthering understanding of early human evolution. A steep-sided ravine in the Great Rift Valley that stretches across East Africa, it is located in the eastern Serengeti Plains in the Arusha Region. The British/Kenyan paleoanthropologist-archeologist team Mary and Louis Leakey established and developed the excavation and research programs at Olduvai Gorge which achieved great advances of human knowledge and world-renowned status. Homo habilis, probably the first early human species, occupied Olduvai Gorge approximately 1.9 million years ago; then came a contemporary australopithecine, Paranthropus boisei, then Homo erectus, 1.2 mya. Homo sapiens is dated to have occupied the site 17,000 years ago. The site is significant in showing the increasing developmental and social complexities in the earliest humans, or hominins, largely as revealed in t