Total Number of People = 1 to 50 people

Olduvai gorge is among the most important and famous east African archaeological sites, with evidence of stone tools and hunting dating back to between 2.5 to 3.4 million years ago. It is located about 40 km north-west of Ngorongoro crater, just a few kilometers off the Serengeti road. It is about 48 km long, and is located in the eastern Serengeti Plains in the Arusha Region. The first European known to have seen Olduvai Gorge was a German butterfly collector, Professor Wilhelm Kattwinkel. In his notes in 1911, he described Olduvai as containing the “book of life” and he took a considerable number of fossils back to Berlin including the teeth of an extinct three-toed horse known as Hipparion. 

In 1929, Louis Leakey visited German geologist Hans Reck and his team, who had found hominin remains there, and along with Mary Leakey they were responsible for most of the excavations and discoveries of the hominin fossils in Olduvai Gorge, including Homo habilis, the australopithecine Zinjanthropus boisei (now known as Paranthropus boisei), and the Laetoli site, another important archaeological site of early human occupation about 45 km away.

The name Olduvai is a misspelling of Oldupai Gorge, which was adopted as the official name in 2005. Oldupai is the Maasai word for the wild sisal plant Sansevieria ehrenbergii, which grows in the gorge.