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In 1893, geologist J.W. Gregory first recognized the contributive importance of East Africa to better understanding the evolutionary history of ancient technologies when he found evidence of “paleoliths” in and around an ancient lake in Maasai country (Cole 1965). In the twentieth century, German entomologist Kattwinkel noted the presence of fossils in 1911 at a rift escarpment known to the Maasai as Olduway, which shortly led German paleontologist Hans Reck to continue work at Olduway (later called olduvai gorge). Reck noticed that important paleontological localities occur where the Side Gorge meets the Main Gorge. But with World War I beginning, his work came to an abrupt halt. When the war came to an end, extensive archeological research resumed across all of Africa, especially in East Africa. Yet the main scientific quest was not to discover more forgotten material cultures; rather, current scientific interests strove to elucidate past climatic events in order to better understand the chronological framework of the fossil and archaeological records that were already known. This is exactly what prompted E.J. Wayland to survey Uganda while he served as the Director of Geological Survey of Uganda. In 1934, he reported an ancient split-pebble industry based on rolled material taken from the Kafu River in western Uganda, which was later extended to include other Ugandan sites, such as Kagera Valley and Nsongezi, by South African archeologist C. van Riet Lowe. It was the nature of the sedimentary record that led Wayland to describe environmental intervals he called “pluvials,” literally meaning rains, that he thought would link Europe’s four-glacier concept to Africa. Today, the Kafuan industry is not recognized as a legitimate stone-tool technology because the stone tools (split-pebbles) are the result of natural fractures, most likely caused by the river environment from which they were found, and the pluvial concept is long forgotten. Wayland was also responsible for describing the Sangoan and Magosian Middle Paleolithic industries from type-sites also located near the Kafu River; the Sangoan is still recognized as a legitimate industry, but Magosian tools fall within the range of variation of an Acheulean-Levallois techno-complex.
Prior to the time that the Kafuan industry made its debut, another famous paleoanthropologist and prehistorian, l.s.b. leakey, was working fervently at stone tool sites in Kenya, dinosaur sites in Tanzania (then Tanganyika), and hominid-bearing deposits in South Africa. After getting his field techniques down in Tanzania and describing simple stone tool manufacture and more recent stone tool technologies of Kenya, in 1931 he organized an expedition to Olduvai Gorge with the help of Hans Reck. He quickly recognized the significance of the stone tools found in the layer cake stratigraphy deposits that ranges in date from 1.9 million years ago at the base, to 1.8 million years ago at Bed I, to recent at Bed IV. Before long, Leakey was back at Olduvai, and from 1935 to 1958 he and members of his team had many celebrated accomplishments in terms of collecting fossil mammals and plenty of stone tools, but had discovered no stone tool maker. That wouldn’t come until 1959 when his wife, mary leakey, discovered Zinjanthropus (Australopithecus boisei), a.k.a. the nutcracker man and, as no surprise, Louis’s stone tool maker. Over the decades, the meticulous excavations
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