- Safari — Wildlife wonders & the journey of a lifetime
- Going Home: A Trip To The Cradle Of Humanity
- Africa on the cheap. What I spent on safari & more
- Geting a Covid test in Tanzania: A how-to guide
Tanzania is home to a remarkable number of early hominid archeology sites. Perhaps the most prominent among them are Oldupai Gorge and Laetoli, a hard-to-get-to site where the oldest hominid footprints showing bipedalism where discovered in 1978. The footprints date back an astonishing 3.7 million years! Encyclopedia Britannia calls them “of monumental importance in the record of human evolution.”
The Practical & the Theoretical
Bipedalism –– along with our large brains — separates us from the great apes.
The Masai may be the most famous African tribe. Learn more from the transnational Masai Association..
Encyclopedia Britannia has a handy phone app and a subscription available for $75 annually that makes it my go-to information source.
For more about Ngorongoro Conservation Area, visit the official site or take a photo tour provided by Google Arts & Culture.
For more on our early ancestors, see the beautiful online exhibit from the Museum of Natural Sciences ,Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences)
For more on Mary Leakey visit the full article at Trowel Blazers (a treasure trove of women archaeologists, geologists, and paleontologists) or the
family history page The Leakey Foundation.
My guide from Slopes Tours & Safaris picked me up at The Equator Hotel at 4:47am. We drove in darkness before reaching Lake Manyera where the road climbs steeply to the Ngorongoro Highlands’ rolling woodlands. We entered the wildlife-rich Ngorongoro Conservation Area at the Ladawe Gate and made the turnoff to Laetoli at 8:30am.
Following our entry, we traveled on a dirt road that was only passable with a four-wheel drive vehicle and some fearless driving. We passed over elephant dung time and time again but spotted none of the creatures. We also passed by at least a dozen Masai settlements in the multi-use conservation area adjacent to Serengeti National Park. By 10:45a we had arrived to find no one else there. We drove to the short way to the curator’s house and found (another), Edward. He took us first to a site with animal imprints. We then walked through the muddy ground to visit the concealed 30 meter long track made by our human ancestors so long ago. My guide was unimpressed — honestly there is not much to see but I was moved to be standing in a place occupied by hominids for over three million years. I was in the Great Rift Valley of Africa, in the Cradle of Humanity.
Nonetheless, I could not escape feeling that the footprints deserve a bigger conservation effort. Thought to have been made by a family of three traipsing through some volcanic ash from the ancient Sadiman Volcano over three million years ago, they have endured the last 40 year without much protection. They are covered by black stones. Edward spoke of plans to build a visitor center and protect the site but it was hard to see anything happening soon. Fortunately, another part of the story can be seen and better enjoyed at Oldupai Gorge Well visited in non-Covid time, and graced with a modern museum this site is also linked to the heroine behind this entire story — Mary Leakey.
According to the wonderfully named blog, Trowel Blazers, Leakey “found and reconstructed a very early primate ancestor, Proconsul africanus in the 1950s; she discovered [in the Oldupai Gorge].and reconstructed the skull of a new homind species: Australopithecus bosei which her husband Louis named (though he called it Zinjanthropus bosei it was later reclassified).” After Louis’ death, she took over excavation at Oldupai and set the stage for the discovery of the footprints left behind in the mud at Laetoli by an early human ancestors, the species that gave us the famous Lucy.
The young guide at the Oldupai Gorge Museum identified himself as a Masai who grew-up nearby. He was in his first year out of college and addressed me as his student when he asked me to sit for his lecture. He held a long tapering thorny leaf in his hand, using it like a make-shirt staff. He asked me what is was and I replied “sisal”, the plant whose Masai name became the moniker for the gorge.
At the end of his short talk he welcomed me home. We are all Africans, “This is your home,” he said pointing with the sisal to the gorge below. I was happy to agree as I took in the ancient beds of sediment. They had captured a record of early human ancestors and turned fleeting moments into a permanent record of what is our common humanity.
To sum up, Oldupai and Laetoli might not provide moments for your Instagram. But for me but they offered a chance to consider our shared ancestry on the ground where it first flourished.
