This week students have been learning about our more recent ancestors that lived over the past 2 million years. At around 1.8 million years there were six or more different species of early human-like species in Africa, and now there is only one left - us, Homo sapiens. Students not only paid close attention to [...]
Yesterday students finally got to look at their fossils in more detail. With the help of instructor Fred Grine and Meave Leakey, students did their best to identify, and piece together, the often very small bone fragments. Finds ranged from mammal bones to crocodile teeth and turtle shells. [...]
On Saturday morning, students went on a short walk to a fossil site just outside TBI. Here, Dr. Meave Leakey taught three different methods of locating fossils. The students had great fun and only reluctantly left for lunch after searching for fossils for over three hours! The ground was littered with fossils, and many, many [...]
Students had a fun and successful day hunting for fossils. The first stop was the site called Losodok - a landscape of rolling hills and - lucky for us - lots of wind. Temperatures can easily sore above 100 F or 40 C during the day. Losodok dates to over 15 million years ago and [...]
Students have been learning more about the animal skeleton and muscles. Bones can tell us about how muscles were attached. Muscles can tell us about what kind of movements an organisms was adapted to performing. So even with only a few key bones, we can learn a lot about an extinct animal. Teeth can reveal [...]
Today students learned the basics about human anatomy and how detailed knowledge of bones is crucial in identifying fossils. Human, or other animal fossils, are very rarely found in one piece – most often found are individual bones, bone or skull fragments, or teeth. Bones can tell us much about an organism: its age, health, [...]
The third module on Human Evolution started early. Professor Fred Grine of Stony Brook University arrived Saturday and took students on an excursion to Lake Turkana. The Turkana Basin has revealed a wealth of human fossils, and is thus also known as "the cradle of human kind". After a short truck ride students arrived [...]
The students went on their first overnight camping trip to Lothagam, a site that dates as far back as eleven million years, and contains fossils and artifacts from as little as several thousand years ago. It consists of a series of faults and outcrops formed by both a once gigantic lake, and volcanic/tectonic activity. [...]