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The crew sieves through soil
looking for fossil bone fragments. |
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WEEK 4 |
Text and photographs by Louise
Leakey |
e have returned to our solid daily routine. We get up
in the cool and quiet of the morning while the jackals
are still calling on their morning patrols. We have a
hot cup of tea and just as it is getting light at 6:15
we are driving out of camp to the sites. There is
always a stunning sunrise in the mornings and it feels
good to see the dawn. It is about an hours' drive to
the site as the roads are rocky and in some places we
have to cross soft sand rivers. Everything is made
ready in the cars the evening before so we don’t delay
in the morning. We put drinking water in the
vehicles, pack food for lunch and refill the cars with
diesel. There are no gas stations here! All of our fuel
is brought to the camp in a truck, a three-and-a-half
day journey on very bad roads. We have to be extremely
careful with our fuel consumption considering what it
takes to get it here.
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Meave,
Richard, and Louise Leakey discuss a fossil while
in the field. |
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My father, Richard, and his friends who were with us had to
leave after their three day visit. We had many useful
discussions about which areas might turn up good
bones, where old airstrips were and which areas were
worked in more detail. While he was here he also
made a trip to Ileret, the village to the north, to
talk with the elders of the community about the
National Park, the importance of the fossil work and
the various community projects that have begun and
could continue to help the people of Ileret. It was my
father who, in 1973, approached the then-president of
the country, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, to ask that the
Dasanaach people at Ileret be granted Kenyan
citizenship in exchange for their weapons. Thus
Richard Leakey has a long history with the people of
the area and is a well-respected elder.
Nina Jablonski, George Chaplin, and Nasser Malit, who is
studying for his Ph.D. at Binghampton University in
the USA, arrived in the aircraft that came in to
collect my father and his friends. Later that same day
I had to fly the aircraft, a single engine Cessna 210,
back to Nairobi. There was a lot of bad weather
that day and I was forced to overnight in Nanyuki, a
smaller town along the way, as
Nairobi was closed due to storms.
Our current aircraft is to be replaced with a Cessna
206, another single engine aircraft better suited to
the flying conditions at Lake Turkana. We have to land
and take off on very short runways, often very heavily
laden with supplies and vehicle spare parts. In
Nairobi I needed to make sure the paperwork and
finances for the new aircraft were in order.
Unfortunately my trip to Nairobi has taken a little
longer than expected as the replacement plane needs
a little bit of work.
However the field work has continued at full steam and
Meave is running the show. The team finds many good
fossils every day. Some of the larger specimens
require careful excavation and will need covering in a
plaster to make them safe for transportation along
the rough roads. This week began with the discovery of
a mysterious looking “globe” …a bone which on first
look could have been the rounded back of a hominid
skull, or calvaria. Digging the sediment away a
little, it turned into a femur head of an elephant.
Never mind, the next one might be better!
Erosion in some areas is much slower than in others
and is particularly slow in the dark hard sandstones.
Where there is less sandstone, more recently eroded
fossils can be found. These were clearly not on the
surface when Richard, Meave and their team were
working through the areas in the 1970s as they would
not have missed them. Sometimes we find the old
aluminum tags with the field numbers on them nailed in
the ground where a fossil was collected in 1977. It is
incredible that these have survived so well. These
positions are recorded with a GPS fix so that the
photographic records can be more accurately updated.
Hominids that were collected in the 1970s were marked
with a
concrete post.
Again these are recorded with a
GPS position for accuracy. A distal humerus of a Homotherium, or sabre-tooth
cat. was collected this week too.
There is much computer work to keep up with in the
afternoons, such as downloading GPS files, renaming and saving
digital images, updating databases etc. It is easy to
get behind when so much is coming in each day. Dominic
found a hominid molar at the end of this week and so
this makes the second hominid of the season. Again it
is unlikely that more will be found of this specimen
but a sieve will be done. When a site is screened or
sieved, sediment brushed or dug from the site is
passed through a screen and the fine dust falls
through, leaving the bigger particles which can be
sorted through more slowly. This makes it easier to
systematically search for fragments of bone. Sometimes
a second screen is done when the sediment is washed.
This Sunday Nasser gave the field crew a talk on
different forms and functions of mandibles and a modern
human skeleton was laid out on the big table in camp
so that everyone could look and feel and familiarise
themselves with the details.
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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