Olduvai and Koobi Fora Sites

The Olduvai Gorge is one of the most popular prehistorical place which is located inGreat Rift Valley. Of the many sites at Olduvai, the most intensively studied is FLK ("Frida Leakey korongo" Frida having been Louis' first wife), where on July 17, 1959, Mary Leakey found the skull of Zinjanthropus boisei (now assigned to Australopithecus boisei), the first fossil hominid found at Olduvai after years of searching. Bed I at FLK is dated to about 1.8 million years ago, and since then remains of Homo habilis and H. erectus have been found in this unit, both at FLK and elsewhere at Olduvai (Pons 1988: 25). Of the excavations at FLK, the ones at the locality where Zinjanthropus was found, known as "FLK Zinj" has attracted the most attention from researchers, for in addition to Zinj and H. habilis ramains, it has also yielded a large sample of about 60,000 animal bones associated with about 2500 stone tools.

About 400 kilometers north of Olduvai in northern Kenya on the eastern side of Lake Turkana is an area known as Koobi Fora, a region of water-borne deposits mingled with a series of volcanic tuffs. One of these tuff layers, the KBS tuff, is dated to approximately 1.8 million years ago and pro¬vides the baseline for dating earlier and later materials in the region. As at Olduvai, significant associations of hominid fossils, stone tools, and animal bones have been found at a number of Koobi Fora sites, the result of both human and natural factors. One of the most intensively studied localities at Koobi Fora is the site known as Fxjj50, dated to approximately 1.5 million years ago.

Northwest of Koobi Fora in southern Ethiopia is the valley of the Omo River, which cuts through several important geological formations. The most important of these is the Shungura Formation, which spans the period between 3.3 million and 800,000 years ago. The Omo deposits have yielded numerous early hominid fossils as well as a detailed record of the other ani¬mals which would have inhabited this region during the crucial periods for the emergence of humans. In addition, one of the key specimens for investigating the emergence of anatomically-modern humans has also been found at Omo.

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