Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa / East Africa
Explore heritage sites and cultural practices from Sub-Saharan Africa / East Africa.
Sites in this Region
Showing 2 documented sites
Koobi Fora Archaeological Site
Koobi Fora, on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, is the most productive fossil site for early human evolution on earth. Since systematic research began in 1968, the sediments of the Koobi Fora Formation have yielded over 10,000 fossil vertebrate specimens including hundreds of hominin fossils representing at least four species of early human, spanning a period from approximately 4 million to 1.5 million years ago. The site has produced some of the most significant individual fossils in the history of paleoanthropology, including the skull KNM-ER 1470 (Homo rudolfensis), which when discovered in 1972 pushed back the origin of the Homo genus by nearly one million years. Koobi Fora is not one site. It is a landscape of paleoanthropological evidence stretching over 1,500 square kilometres of badlands along the eastern shore of the largest desert lake in the world.
Serengeti National Park
The Serengeti is a 14,763 square kilometre savanna ecosystem in northern Tanzania that sustains the largest terrestrial mammal migration on earth: 1.5 million wildebeest, 200,000 zebra, and 500,000 gazelle completing an annual circuit of approximately 3,000 kilometres through Tanzania and Kenya, following the rains and the grass. It is one of the last intact large mammal assemblages on the planet, and the annual migration — crossing the Mara River through crocodile-filled waters — is widely considered one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in the natural world.