Housed in the former King George V Memorial Museum building near the Botanical Gardens, the National Museum is the place to put Tanzania's deep human history into context. The headline draw is the cast of the 3.6-million-year-old Laetoli footprints alongside Louis and Mary Leakey's hominid finds from Olduvai Gorge — including the skull nicknamed "Nutcracker Man". Other galleries cover the Swahili coast, the German and British colonial periods, and traditional crafts. It is small, a little tired, and entirely worth the hour or two it takes to visit.
National Museum of Tanzania
Laetoli footprints and Leakey fossils in a colonial-era building