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Come siesta time the crew
improvises shade where there is none by stretching a tarp between
vehicles. |
MORE PHOTOS
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WEEK 11 |
Text and photographs by Louise
Leakey |
t is always exciting to work in an area that has not
been visited for a while, as there are always new
things that have eroded out to the surface. This week
Robert was in top form. One morning he had walked
particularly far north in Area 119 and had returned
late to lunch under the tree with the crew. He was
thirsty when he returned and lay down to rest in the
shade that the crew had put up between the cars to eat
his lunch before he told his colleagues that later in
the morning he had found a
partial homind jaw with its
second and third molars. This once belonged to a
Paranthropus boisei. Sadly the remainder of this
specimen is likely to have washed away a long time ago
but we will have to do a hill crawl here to make quite
sure of this. A hill crawl involves putting the team
in a long line and having them work gradually across
the surface turning over every stone and looking for
any possible pieces. It is too big an area to screen
immediately so we start this way. They all went back
to the site that afternoon to see if they could find
more of it washing down the small stream channel.
Robert by this time had wandered off to another hill a
little way from everyone else and came across five
beautiful large jet black hominid teeth. He had two
different individuals in one day and from less than
300 meters apart. This site needed immediate screening
and the team spent several days recovering many
fragments of the tooth roots but sadly not much else.
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Mutuku
finds his first hominid. |
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Mutuku had his day and found an
isolated hominid molar only 50 meters or so from the
tortoise house on a flat surface covered in fine
wind-blown sand. It is surprising as many visitors
must have walked over this specimen for a long time,
but as I have pointed out before, unless you are
looking for something specifically, fossils and
especially hominids are actually quite hard to find!
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So everyone was in great spirits this week and in full
momentum. We excavated a beautiful two-million year
hyena skull, a different species from the modern
spotted hyena. Its species name is Crocuta ultra and
it has slightly smaller teeth than the modern bone
crunching hyenids.
Towards the end of this week Meave returned from the
USA having had a productive lecture tour and I flew
Meave and my father Richard back north in the plane.
We are coming to the end of the field season and so we
need to spend much of the next few days finalising the
work and making sure that everything outstanding is
done or made safe for a subsequent field season. We
are hoping to return to the field in January, February
and March again also later in June July and August to
continue with the work. However we must now go in
pursuit of the funding to cover this work.
My father went north to Ileret to have second meeting
with the community
elders and youth leaders and explain the significance
of the work and the potential for themselves in terms
of visitor attraction and international recognition.
Part of our annual fundraising efforts are to raise
some support for the community as well.
This week in camp we were lucky to find a Rufous
Beaked Snake
in one of the rooms in the main camp. It is about a
meter and a half in length and is not venomous
although sadly it is sometimes confused with the
spitting cobras, which can be similarly coloured. This
snake though has a distinctive black strip across its
eye. We pushed him out into the long dry grass with a
stick and watched him slide away. We also watched a
sand boa take an unsuspecting bird hopping past his
hole, strangle it, and disappear back to dispatch of
it in the quiet.
Louise Leakey,
Koobi Fora
May, 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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