Ileret Primary School student Erek was one lucky girl to have worked and mingled with the hominid gang although for a short time when her discovered specimen ended up in the documented field data for the day
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Erek a grade eight student from Ileret Primary school with the fossil horn core that she discovered outside the village. A boy watches curiously
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The crew was working just outside the village on one of the areas that border this sleepy village of Ileret. The cheerful girl and the only girl in that class of 2010, approached me in the morning saying that she had discovered something and could i go and check. It was a good gesture; at least future scientists were appreciating this heritage and at that tender age! Not quite sure (sometimes false alarms are raised and after doing ten Kilometers, we have sometimes been confounded with the sight of a gigantic boulder passing off for a hominid skull!) i decided to just give it the benefit of the doubt; i could also help her to identify the rocks and the fossils for posterity.
the horn core that Erek discovered and the field number 22246 and her name on the palm computer put to rest the historical fact that she discovered this beautiful specimen
What was amazing was the identification part and by this time i had attracted a small crowd of curious children from the village who were suggesting names of what this would have been in real life and it was encouraging and utterly fascinating to just listen to their identification skills even at these diminutive ages. I had a to put a note at the end of the episode that if only they could get this from this early in life, conserving Sibiloi National park would be a foregone conclusion. But i digress, that is the story for another day…..
