Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa
Explore heritage sites and cultural practices from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Sites in this Region
Showing 2 documented sites
Olduvai Gorge
Olduvai Gorge (also spelled Oldupai Gorge, the preferred contemporary spelling from the Maasai oldupaai, the wild sisal plant) is one of the most important palaeontological and archaeological sites in the world — a 48-kilometre gorge cut by a stream through the stratified deposits of the eastern Serengeti plateau, exposing sedimentary layers dating from 2.1 million to 15,000 years ago that contain an extraordinary sequence of early human fossil remains, stone tool assemblages, and fossil fauna. The Gorge is often called the 'Cradle of Humanity' in East Africa for the discoveries made there by Louis and Mary Leakey from the 1930s onward: Zinjanthropus boisei (now Paranthropus boisei, 1959), Homo habilis (1960, the first tool-making human ancestor), and multiple other hominin fossils spanning the critical period of the emergence of the genus Homo. The sedimentary sequence at Olduvai documents, in a single location, nearly two million years of human evolutionary history.
Timbuktu
A city at the edge of the Sahara that was, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, one of the most important centres of Islamic scholarship in the world — a city of mosques, madrasas, and libraries that preserved and produced manuscripts numbering in the hundreds of thousands, many still surviving in private family collections and public archives. Its three great mosques — Djinguereber, Sankore, and Sidi Yahia — built of banco, the sun-dried mud brick that is both the city's defining material and its perpetual structural challenge, are the physical embodiment of a scholarly tradition that connected sub-Saharan Africa to the broader world of Islamic learning. The city now faces a convergence of desertification, jihadist violence, institutional weakness, and climate change that has placed it among the most acutely threatened World Heritage Sites in the world.