Olduvai Gorge

In 1931, Louis Leakey, the son of a British missionary family working in Kenya, began looking for evidence of the hominid-pongid split at Olduvai with his wife Mary.  The couple had to wait until 1959 to discover fragments of an adult male hominid who was given the name Zinjanthropus - Nutcracker man due to his massive teeth and cheekbones.  Aged 1.8 million years old it was later renamed Australopithecus boisei.  Further discoveries made by the Leakeys was the bones named Homo Habilis - Handy Man - living between 1.8 and 1.6 million years ago.  Homo Habilis's large cranial capacity and well developed hands suggest he was a maker of tools, and therefore an entirely new genus and going on to become Homo eructus and eventually Homo sapiens.  According to Leakey, Australopithecus was a dead-end branch in the tree of human evolution and existed alongside Homo Habilis.