Books in the Olduvai Gorge 5 Volume Paperback Set series

In this set of books Leakey and his collaborators discuss the geological evidence, its relation to the fauna and other fossil evidence, the problems of climatic sequence and the use of potassium-argon dating. The purpose of this volume is to provide a context in which the fossil human remains and the Stone Age cultural sequence at Olduvai can be studied.

The formations discussed in this volume, Beds I and II, were deposited in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene and have yielded large quantities of the remains of early man, in the form of bones and stone tools and evidence of the environment in which they lived.

On 15 August 1959 Dr L. S. B. Leakey announced the discovery, in the lowest level of Olduvai Gorge, of a new and beautifully preserved fossil cranium of a hominid, which he tentatively named Zinjanthropus boisei. For this second volume, Professor Tobias has undertaken a definitive analysis of the cranium.

This volume, written largely by Mary Leakey herself, is the last of the reports on the Olduvai excavation and records the archaeological finds in the upper part of the Olduvai sequence from excavations carried out from the end of 1968 until 1971.