Olorgesailie 2004 Field Season

July 14, 2004

What happens to artifacts after they are exposed by excavation? I briefly described a lift last week, but I wanted to go into more detail. How we remove artifacts from their original position is a very important part of what we do here, since we're not only interested in the artifacts themselves, but also what other information about hominin behavior they can give us.In the process of excavating things and removing them for study, we inevitably destroy the ancient organization of things. So we have to be especially careful when gathering information. If we mess up in the records we keep, it's almost impossible to return, put the artifacts back in their original positions and see how they relate to the original sediments. It's kind of like…

July 12, 2004

Mt. Olorgesailie is a huge part of our experience here. We wake up every morning and see it from our tents. It overlooks our camp and helps orient us wherever we walk. I've already described the things we find in the basin below, but what's up on the mountain?

The answer is: rocks! I mentioned earlier that the mountains within the rift are almost entirely volcanic, formed when the super hot magma within the earth erupted to the surface and cooled. There are many different kinds of volcanic rocks. We talked about pumice and ash, but there's also obsidian, which is a kind of volcanic glass. Basalt is a dark, dense rock that erupted repeatedly from Mt. Olorgesailie and nearby fissures. And there are several other…

July 10, 2004

I drove to Nairobi late yesterday and this afternoon accompanied Dr. Kay Behrensmeyer and the students of the Geology Field Course to Olorgesailie. It's their first night in the field. During the coming weeks, I'll let you know what they're learning about the geology of Olorgesailie.Before all that begins, I was eager to check the three excavations we started at the beginning of the season. Particularly interesting are Site 15 and CL1-1 because stone tools and fossil bones are appearing in both excavations.At Site 15, the excavators have uncovered a long depression or channel that runs diagonally across the excavation. You can see it in the photograph below: starting at the upper right, it goes under Benard Mukilya and ends in the lower left. The edges of…

July 8, 2004

John and I, along with Muteti, Bernard Kanunga (our assistant foreman), Amanda and Lynn, drove to Locality G. It's on the edge of the Olorgesailie basin in the younger sediments. It takes a while to get there - about a 15 minute drive followed by a 45 minute walk. John is interested in the Middle Stone Age, an African stone technology that appeared from about 250,000 to 40,000 years ago. The MSA, as we call it, followed the Acheulean. While the diagnostic technology of the Acheulean was the ability to make handaxes and similar large cutting tools, the diagnostic technology of the MSA is the ability to make Levallois flakes. Levallois technology was named after the site in France where it was first found.The hominins who made…

July 6, 2004

On Tuesdays we always send a truck to Nairobi to get supplies - food and other necessities that should last us a week. King'ola, Francis, and Mutuku are the cooks and camp assistants who prepare food for the excavation team and researchers. They also keep our tents clean and our camp running smoothly. We've worked together for so many years that they know what food and supplies I like to have on hand. So yesterday, as usual, they filled out our supply lists, which are taken to the general grocery store, the butcher shop, and the vegetable market, where our orders are packed up in boxes for bringing to camp. It's important to get it right since our group depends on the food and other supplies brought…

July 4, 2004

The past week has been quite exciting - new excavations, the announcement of the hominin fossil, handaxes appearing in our excavations at site CL1-1 and now we all deserve a day of rest. I like to call Sundays the "Etch-a-Sketch" day, where we turn our thoughts over, shake them a bit, and start the week with a clean slate. We get an extra hour or so of sleep, and breakfast is served at 8 instead of 6:45 am. The cooks prepare a treat for us - French toast with golden syrup, which is, without fail, delicious. We then spend the day relaxing or catching up on work.I try to make sure that the food here is very good for all the visiting scientists, students, and the excavation…

July 2, 2004

Today, our paper was published in the journal Science. Each week Science publishes many papers in a whole variety of scientific fields. So the papers in this journal are always very short - ours is only 3 pages. The National Museums of Kenya held a press conference, where I gave a brief talk and answered questions from reporters and museum scientists. As you might expect, I've been asked a lot about the significance of the find.One thing is that very little is known about what the early humans in Africa looked like between about 1 million and 600,000 years ago, despite all the stone tools they left behind. In fact, the Olorgesailie fossil is the only one definitely dated to that 400,000-year gap in the African fossil…