In our final week of Geology, Dr. Gathogo took the students out in the field to explore the Miocene and Pliocene sediments in the Turkana Basin. This provided an opportunity for the students to apply their sedimentology skills. An early morning excursion to Lothagam on Tuesday had students practice their geological skills, which [...]
Hello! My name is Owich and I am an anthropology graduate from the University of Nairobi. We began our second week of geology with a morning classroom session with Dr. Gathogo taking us through the short Cretaceous window, and reconstruction of the Turkana basin geography and particularly the Cenozoic (Age of mammals) rich-sediments. In summary, [...]
Molecular studies in the late 1960s demonstrated that humans are closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas, and that all three of these great ape lineages shared a relatively recent origin on the African continent. Continued study and methodological advances since this time have revealed that humans and chimpanzees are each other’s closest living relatives and [...]
As part of the TBI Field School students get to work on new fossil material. Well, maybe not “new” in the normal sense of that word, but they get to work with material that no one else has laid hands on or thought about because it just came out of the ground a few days [...]
Lothagam was too expansive, too important, and just too beautiful to be limited to a one-day visit or one blog post. As usual, the students rose with the dawn, the red rocks of Lothagam radiant with scarlet light. Quickly the nets and bedrolls were packed away, boots were laced, sunscreen applied, and we [...]
Lothagam isn’t a name that comes up very often in Physical Anthropology classes. It wasn’t a name a lot of the students on the field school knew before they came out to TBI. But over the last few weeks there was a building drumbeat: Lothagam: the lonely hill on a distant horizon. Lothagam: the oldest [...]