At first glance, the Turkana Basin can seem like a desolate place with a pretty simple food web. Looking out over the landscape, there are widely spaced acacias across the sand flats with scrubby, needle-bearing Indigofera shrubs filling in the gaps for hungry herbivores.
After an early morning in Nairobi, everyone boarded a small plane and we flew north up the Great Rift Valley. We watched the green highlands give way to the arid Northwest: our home for the next ten weeks.
For paleontologists and archaeologists it can take a lot of imagination to conjure up the ancient environments that surrounded the animals and artifacts being excavated. Without a clear idea of the environmental context that surrounded the material exhumed from the ground, it’s tough to examine the clues to paleoecological interactions preserved beneath our [...]
After months of anticipation, hundreds of questions and a couple bouts of packing, weighing and re-packing, the Spring 2013 Turkana Basin Field School is finally underway and so is the field blog. Over the next few months, check-in here if you want to know what's going on in the Turkana Basin, what we're learning, and [...]
Our amazing Africa experience has come to an end - time rushed by at an astonishing speed! We did have a fantastic last day though: a closing ceremony with Drs Richard and Meave Leakey. After an inspiring speech by Richard Leakey, students received a beautiful TBI Field School certificate. What a great last day! The [...]
With all their new knowledge about our ancestors and the tools they used, students got to make their own stone tools! Knapping -manipulating stone to create a tool - is not as easy as it sounds. Its a real art because you need the right stones, the right force, and need to know where and [...]
Yesterday students went to a site rich in pottery shards, ostrich egg shells, stone tools and beads. Even though is was hot, the numerous artifacts that were easily spotted on the sandy surface, made for an exciting afternoon. The site was characterized by large silvery sand dunes and a beautiful vista of Lake Turkana. The exact age [...]
Students continued to learn more about stone tools – what they look like, their purpose, and how they were made. In the early stages, starting maybe about 3 million years ago, humans made tools by breaking up stones. The sharp edges flakes were used as knives, whereas others might have been used to crush or [...]