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FOREGROUND: Nyete has found
the first homind fossil of the season, the distal end of a boisei
femur. BACKGROUND: The rugged Turkana landscape. |
MORE PHOTOS
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WEEK 3 |
Text and photographs by Louise
Leakey |
t is good to get back to our fossil hunting routine
and to go out to the fossil areas every day again. The
city of Nairobi seems very far away now which is very
restful. We have a good team and I will introduce
them to you soon. However to give you an idea of
numbers involved in this years work, we are a total of
twenty one people. Robert, Justus and Stephen are with
us from the National Museums of Kenya, Arkoi is with
us from Ileret, the village to the north of the park,
Mutuku, Dominic, Kenga, Christopher, Nzube, Nyete,
Kyalo are the fossil hunters. Muli and Malika are in
the kitchen, Sina and Njoroge are both drivers and
mechanics and then Maina, Meave, myself. We will be
joined this week by our colleagues, Nasser Malit, Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin, who will be with us for a
few weeks to help with the fieldwork, work on the GIS
and data entry of all the specimens that we collect.
It is going to be a busy three months but it should be
very rewarding. We hope that the next few weeks will
begin to bear some good news.
It always does take a few weeks to get our “eyes in”
and to familiarize ourselves again with the fossils,
what to look for amongst the black sandstone and in
the incredibly hot sun. Back in camp on Sunday afternoons we
often go through some of the modern bones and fossil
hominid casts that we keep as a reference collection. It is important to have a basic understanding
of anatomy and why different bones are shaped
differently in different animals. An aardvark, which
is a nocturnal ant-eating mammal, has to have
specialised joints to allow it to dig fast and
effectively into termite mounds. An aardvark distal
ulna is therefore quite different to that of another
mammal. Meave found some modern aardvark bones while
she was walking one day and gave it to the crew as a
test! Maybe they will now find a fossil aardvark.
When one of the fossil hunters finds a good fossil it
is marked with a cairn of stones. It is then
photographed and a GPS satellite position or fix is
taken. In the evenings we can go through the days
finds and work out the fossils that need collecting
urgently. All this information is kept in a database
of fossils to collect.
One evening this week the team came into camp and
waited for us to download the days images to show us a
particular find that was made that afternoons. Sure
enough Nyete had found the distal end of a hominid
humerus and had marked it with a cairn of stones. This is the first
hominid of the season! It was lying on the edge of a
rocky slope and had been on the surface for quite a
while.
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A
near-complete crocodile skull, one of the many
good finds this week. |
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We were very fortunate this week to have my father and
some friends of his pay us a visit. We all went out to
the site where the hominid humerus was found to
collect this. It was most definitely a distal humerus
of Australopithecus boisei. I think there is only one
other boisei distal humerus from the Turkana Basin so
it is good to have this in addition. It was unlikely
that we would find more of this specimen but we did a
screen all the same. Nothing did turn up in the
screen.
Some of the other fossils this week included a
magnificent crocodile skull, some 3 ft in length, as well as a tiny baby crocodile
skull of a Euthecodon. It took a long time to find all
the tiny pieces of this small crocodile which must
have been barely hatched. They also found many bits of
fossil hippo and the usual bovid (antelope) horn cores
and suid (pig) teeth.
On the Sunday afternoon we took the fossil team to see
the small exhibit in the Koobi Fora Museum, which
proved highly entertaining as some of them posed for
pictures with the dioramas. This museum gives a very good background to
the area and the work that has been done here in the
past. Some of the displays require updating and the
museum is also in desperate need of renovation.
This week on various trips to and from the site we
were lucky to see two beautiful cheetah, as well as
gerenuk, lesser kudu, mongoose and oryx. This is truly
a spectacular National Park to be working in .
Louise Leakey,
Koobi Fora
February, 2004
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION: The Koobi Fora Research Project annual
paleoanthropological expedition. |
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LOCATION:
The area surrounding Lake Turkana, in the
extreme north of Kenya. This region is
extremely rich in hominid fossils and has
produced some of the oldest dates for Homo.
Launch
Position Locator. |
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PURPOSE:
To increase knowledge of the origins of our
genus, Homo, and the context in which
we evolved. |
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