Olduvai Gorge, Northern Tanzania

July 2023 Update

Hi,
Here I am playing my Voyage Air Dreadnought guitar at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, the “Cradle of Humankind”. We are archaeologists working here, and designed and built this educational monument featuring giant 5,000 lb sculptures of Olduvai’s most famous fossil skulls, both dating to 1.84 million years ago.
Left: the smaller-brained Paranthropus boisei (“Zinjanthropus” or”Nutcracker Man”), a proto-human lineage that goes extinct by one million years ago. 
Right: our tool-using ancestor, Homo habilis (“Handy Man”).

Cheers,
Nicholas Toth, PhD
Indiana University & The Stone Age Institute (www.stoneageinstitute.org)

Here are a couple of photos of me playing my VoyageAir guitar at Olduvai Gorge, northern Tanzania (“The Grand Canyon of Human Prehistory”.) This guitar travels well and plays great (even in the extreme tropical arid conditions on the Serengeti Plain), and is one of my very favorite guitars. The children are local Maasai from the nearby boma (village), who came over to hear me play.

You can see me playing the guitar on  “Zinjanthropus Blues”.  You can see Bill Kaman (former president of Ovation) playing my guitar if you search “Safari Blues, Tanzania” (Bill is a good friend and great guitarist; he joined us on a 10-day safari to Tanzanian game parks last June).

You can listen to our songs about evolution at our web site http://www.stoneageinstitute.org  under “Music Projects”. Our good friend Seymour Duncan (the pickup guy) is our lead guitarist.

Yours very truly,

Nicholas Toth, PhD
Co-Director, The Stone Age Institute
Professor, Anthropology Department and Cognitive Science Program
Adjunct Professor of Biology and Geology
Indiana University, Bloomington
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

“Zinjanthropus Blues”

“Safari Blues, Tanzania”