Olduvai Gorge lies between the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti, along the road you already drive on safari. It is one of the most important places in the world for research into the earliest humans. There is a small museum on the edge of the gorge, and a stop takes about an hour.
A gorge some fifty kilometres long, cut into layers of volcanic ash and sediment. Every layer is a stretch of time. Look along the wall and you are looking back almost two million years.
The name comes from oldupai, the word in Maa, the language of the Maasai, for the wild sisal that grows there.
Louis and Mary Leakey searched here for decades. In 1959 Mary Leakey found the skull of an early hominin now known as Paranthropus boisei. Remains of Homo habilis followed, along with thousands of stone tools, so old that the earliest tool tradition is named after this place: Oldowan.
At Laetoli, not far from the gorge, footprints of hominins walking upright were found in 1978, preserved in volcanic ash around 3.6 million years old.
Because so many traces of early humans lie together here, across such a long span of time. It is not the only place in Africa with finds like these, but it is one of the best known.
The museum stands on the edge of the gorge. You see casts, tools and the story of the excavations, and a member of staff explains what you are looking at from above the gorge. Then you drive on to the Serengeti.
It is not a day in itself. It is an hour that breaks up the drive from the crater to the Serengeti, and it gives the landscape you see over the following days a different depth.
On the route from the Ngorongoro to the Serengeti, and back. Tell your guide if you would like to stop.
The drive from the Ngorongoro Crater to the Serengeti is part of almost all our northern trips. Our itineraries show where that day falls in a trip.