Olduvai Gorge

Now that I have a nice map and before I go off on tangents describing all my adventures in Tanzania, perhaps I should explain why I was going there in first place...

Practically my whole life I wanted to be an archaeologist. One of my favorite books when I was younger just had pictures of King Tut. For my master's thesis, I wanted to do something that combined geology and archaeology, but seeing as I find sitting hunched over for hours in the hot sun digging quite tedious, I decided to find a geology project that would be important for understanding an archaeological site instead. There begins my interest in Olduvai Gorge.

The gorge is named after this plant called Oldupai that grows everywhere 

in the gorge, but somehow was anglicized to Olduvai.

Now why is Olduvai important you may ask? Mostly because back in the 1960s Mary and Louise Leakey began finding hominin fossils and tools there and archaeologists have been finding them ever since. If you would like to learn more about the Leakeys, I suggest this book Ancestral Passions that my advisor gave me last year for Christmas.

Here I am holding an enormous hand axe made out of quartzite. I wish I could say i found it, but sadly I only got to hold it. I did help out on one of the archaeological digs for one day, but I didn't find anything interesting.Fortunately for me, the archaeologists need geologists to tell them what the environment was like millions of years ago, and that's where my project comes in. I'm looking at soils that formed along a lake 1.8 million years ago and have been buried. These buried soils are now are exposed in this gorge cut into the Serengeti Plain and can tell you a lot about the environment.

Here I am describing them. More on that later!