Olduvai Gorge lies in the eastern Serengeti plains of Northern Tanzania and is at an altitude of 4400 feet above sea level. It drains eastwards into the fault trough of the Olbalbal Depression from two lakes at the head of the gorge, known as Ndutu and Masek. These occasionally overflow into the Olduvai river during particularly wet years. The river is seasonal and flows through a shallow valley in its upper reaches, but where the basement rocks give place to sediments the valley changes dramatically to a steep-sided gorge. A southern branch, known as the Side Gorge, has its headwaters on Lemagrut mountain, to the south-west, and it is in this gorge that the Olduvai deposits can be seen to overlie the earlier Laetolil Beds.
Olduvai first became known to the scientific world in 1911 when a German entomologist, Professor Kattwinkel, who was collecting butterflies, came across the gorge accidentally. He picked up a number of fossils including teeth of Hipparion and took them to Berlin, where they aroused great interest. As a result, a German expedition under the leadership of a geologist, Professor Hans Reck, spent three months at Olduvai during 1913. The results were published the folJowing year (Reck 1914a, 1914b). Reck set up the system of numbering the Olduvai lithological units I to V, in ascending order, a system that is still in use, although some alterations have been made for Beds IV and V.
A great deal of faunal material was collected during
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