Stone tools which were a vital technological invention of early humans, enabling them to do things like butchering. Oldowan and Acheulean stone tool technologies were collectively prevalent for millions of years; now it was time for our modern day students to try their hand at reliving their ancient ancestors' ways of life. On Monday Dr. [...]
On Friday the field school said goodbye to our camp at Ileret where we've lived for the past 7 weeks and got on the TBI plane to fly over the "Jade Sea" (Lake Turkana) to our new home, the Turkwel campus.
We are into the last week of the Human Origins module. As the students have come to find out, the phylogenetic tree of human ancestry is more bushy than expected.
This Week, the students have been introduced to the story of being and becoming human. The scientific story of human evolution. Humans have always been curious to identify who they really are which poses questions like; how and why are we different from other mammals? What made us develop distinct traits like bipedality and bigger [...]
The students are now well into the Vertebrate Paleontology course with Dr. Bill Sanders from the University of Michigan. Professor Sanders has been teaching the students how to interpret the skeleton and teeth of animals in order to understand how they lived. You can understand a lot about an animal based on its bones. The [...]
A Dasenach village. Photo: Rosie Bryson The students visited a village in Ileret and got to know more about the culture of the local Dasenach people. The Dasenach are a pastoralist community living in Marsabit County within the Turkana region. One of the things the students learned was the division of labour within [...]
In the last week, we have been delving deeper into the geology of the Turkana Basin. This included seeking to understand how stratigraphic units (distinct layers of soil piled on top of each other which represent different time periods) are formed and how to interpret individual sedimentary strata’s in order to reconstruct past environments. [...]
Our Geology module with Dr. Craig Feibel and Dr. Robert Raynolds continues at the TBI campus! Dr. Feibel started off the week with an introduction to the different rock “species” found in the Rift Valley. The students have been working hard to memorize more than 20 different types of rock, as well as state it’s [...]