 |
 |
 |
| |
|
|
Taking a refreshing swim in Lake Turkana to wash off after a
dusty excavation.
MORE IMAGES. |
|
| |
|
DISPATCH 06:
Paranthropus molar
Previous Dispatch
:
Next
Dispatch
KOOBI FORA, Kenya
With the entire team now at Ileret the excavation is progressing
much more quickly this week. They started by taking off the
overburden with shovels and picks and then when they got down to
the layer began to excavate carefully through a clay bed and
then through the sands with the large calcrete nodules in it.
All the excavated and screened material is then
put into sacks
which are
carried by hand
across the exposures to the vehicle
and driven back to camp each evening. Patrick's interpretation
of the depositional environment of the site is that of a fluvial
flood plain intersected by several small sand channels formed
when the river breaks its banks during a flooded interval. We
have still not recovered anything terribly exciting from the
excavation or the sieves although there is a piece of bone that
might be a skull fragment that came out of the screens. While
this work has been continuing at the site,
Francis Kirera, a
Kenyan Ph.D student at University of Arkansas, has been looking
at fossil sites to the north, hoping to sample an uncollected
area so as to look at the distributions of fossils across an
undisturbed landscape and do some interpretation of the
taphonomy.
While we were out walking with Patrick this morning so he could
take us through the geological section in area 6a close to
Ileret, I bent down and picked up a tooth and exclaimed
“Hominid!” They all thought I was playing around so they carried
on walking! It was a complete hominid tooth belonging to P.
boisei. It was not far from an earlier excavation done in
the 1970s and must have eroded out since then.
Patrick has also taken the field crew out on several occasions
this season to show them some distinguishable geological
features that indicate certain depositional environment and
likely places to find the fossils.
|
|
|
|
