Olorgesailie 2004 Field Season

August 13, 2004

Whew! The last day of work for the season. It was tense, but all the sieving of sediment, closing down of excavations, recording of measurements, and packing of specimens has been completed. We're ready to roll to Nairobi tomorrow morning.My last visit to an excavation today was to the hominin fossil site, the one from last year. We've now ended all the digging and sieving of loose sediment beneath the place of discovery, right down to the volcanic bedrock. As for the photo, I'd like to pay tribute to George Mumo (whose head is just poking up from the gully), Kakai ole Milto and Kiluva Nume (who are doing the sieving). They're the three guys in the picture who worked tirelessly all season to look for more…

August 11, 2004

Today, the excavators, transit fundis, and I completed our final lift of the season at Site 15. This last haul of about 100 fossil bones and stone tools helped a lot in figuring out exactly what happened at this site, about 990,000 years ago. We found several fragments of leg bones with sharp fractures, indicating that the bones had been broken while still fresh. They were found along side stone flakes, a couple cobbles, and teeth of a really old zebra. You can see two of the teeth, with worn chewing surfaces of an incisor (near the top) and a premolar (below), along with some small bone fragments. These finds are similar to something we observed some years ago - the teeth of zebras and antelopes discovered…

August 9, 2004

We had a really interesting surprise today. At least once or twice each summer, we find something really neat in our digs we didn't know about before.Today's big job was to carefully remove the hundreds of stones found in excavation Site CL1-1. You may recall that it's the oldest handaxe site known so far at Olorgesailie. The site is nearly 2 meters above a volcanic tuff dated 1.2 million years old (by the argon-argon technique). And about 2 meters beneath a younger tuff that's 992,000 years old. Sandwiched between the two dates, Site CL1-1 is probably a little older than a million years.As you can see in the photo on the left, we discovered a really dense accumulation of Acheulean handaxes. As the excavators unearthed them, we…

August 7, 2004

Alison has started her own excavations in Locality B, across the river and nearer the foothills of Mt. Olorgesailie than either Site 15 or DE 89. Like Locality G, where John has been working, Locality B has exposures of the New Formation and the later Oltepesi Formation, with some Middle Stone Age and Sangoan sites.

Last year, Alison excavated a geology trench down one hill, and found many MSA stone tools, but not many bones. This year, after surveying one area, she found more obsidian flakes and some more bones, and decided to excavate there. In Locality B, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly where on the slope of a hill the artifacts are coming from. Alison spent a day walking up and down the hill…

August 5, 2004

It's important to plan the last week of our excavations with great care. I've also begun to take stock of what we've uncovered so far this season, and how it compares to what we thought we might find. I remember thinking when we started this year's work at Site 15 that we might find another butchery site. The bones and stones that were visible in the wall of the excavation seemed to suggest that a zebra was cut up for meat here by early humans.What we actually found through the season did not paint so clear a picture. We did find many flakes and stone tools, which would have been used in a butchery site. We also found a good number of teeth of a very large…

August 3, 2004

Last week I mentioned the debate about modern human origins - how some people think that modern human behavior originated quite late in prehistory, around the time when biologically modern humans arrived in Europe, while others think it developed earlier and very gradually, particularly in Africa.Alison is a strong proponent of the early, gradual hypothesis. Her work in other places in Africa has shown many cases where early modern humans had more complex behavior than was expected during the Middle Stone Age (MSA). In Botswana, fossil animal bones showed that humans were hunting large, dangerous animals that no one thought they'd have the technology or ability to go after. At Katanda in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), Alison and John found barbed bone points and many…

August 1, 2004

In a couple weeks our field season will end. Instead of waiting for the last Saturday evening, I decided that last night was a good time for our annual goat roast and camp party. Every year I buy a goat and present it to our field excavation crew to thank them for their hard work during the season. They, in turn, invite me and the others to join them for dinner - with some music and dancing after the feast.So last night, we all sat around the large campfire and ate roast goat, ugali (a cornmeal dish), and salad. After dinner, the crew called for speeches to mark the occasion - and, as usual, they asked me to start. I thanked them for the work they've done…