Olorgesailie 2011 Field Season

August 2, 2011

We’re in our last few days of the field season, but research is still going full speed ahead. Joining us for these last few days is our Kenyan friend and paleobotanist, Ms. Rahab Kinyanjui.Rahab was born and raised in Nakuru, Kenya. She attended primary school in Nakuru and high school in Thika.  Her science interests soared at the Kenyan Polytechnic, where she did a dissertation studying the archeology, pollen analysis, and reconstruction of a site in Nakuru called Hyrax Hill. After graduating from the Polytechnic with her 3-year diploma, Rahab began work at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) studying palynology and paleobotany. It was here where we crossed paths for the first time, in 2001. I worked with a colleague at the NMK for several years…

July 31, 2011

We’re close to the end of the field season – just a few more days left – and we’ve come to the end of one of our excavations, Site 15. If you read my dispatch on July 25^th, you may recall that as we reached the base of the artifact layer, we couldn’t quite figure out what the cluster of large cobbles in one area of the dig was all about.  Why were the cobbles where they were – concentrated in one spot? 

The water that rained on, or flowed across, the site as it was forming was probably pretty slow and inadequate to move the cobbles into the position we found them.  We can tell that from the beds of sediment we unearthed at Site…

July 29, 2011

The road to becoming human was sometimes a dangerous one, and survival required sophisticated weapons. Here at Olorgesailie, the BOK-2 team has uncovered one of the first kinds of such weapons—the MSA point. The MSA, or Middle Stone Age, is the more recent of the two stone technologies we have a record of here at Olorgesailie. In our digs, the MSA is represented in a younger formation called the Oltulelei Formation, which lies on top of the older Olorgesailie Formation. This time period is the expertise of Alison and John. The MSA is an intriguing time in prehistory characterized by the rise of much more complicated tool kit and ways of manufacturing tools (i.e., stone technologies).  Flake blades and smaller, more sophisticated prepared cores begin to appear, but…

July 27, 2011

Once upon a time, this arid and dusty terrain was once the home of an ancient lake. Observations of the sediments show that water once filled the Olorgesailie basin. The paleo-lake was a major hotspot, attractive to wildlife and hominins. Therefore, reconstructing the lake and its environment is paramount in our understanding of the life that once lived here. 

Actually, we should use the plural ‘environments’ because the lake changed considerably over its history. The person who has helped us understand this visited camp today.  Bernie Owen is an old friend to our project, and he’s spent many summers with us at Olorgesailie as our diatom specialist. He was joined by colleagues Robin Renaut, Tim Lowenstein, and a graduate student Ginette Felske.Diatoms are a…

July 25, 2011

You may recall that we have another excavation going on this season besides the Middle Stone Age site called BOK-2. This other excavation, called Site 15, is one made famous by the fossil elephant skeleton found there along with thousands of stone tools. It’s from the handaxe times, which at Olorgesailie extended from 1.2 million to about 490,000 years old.  A newly published article from a site at Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya, shows that handaxe technology (known as the Acheulean) got its start almost 1.8 million years ago.The digging at Site 15 has gone very well – that is, ‘slow but sure.’ Let me give you an update about the questions that have cropped up as our team of seven has dug downward a few centimeters…

July 23, 2011

Evolution doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, changes in the environment usually take thousands of years to be represented by evolution in the morphology, or biological form, of organisms. Yet bones and teeth (and other bodily substances, like shells for organisms that have them) can also record information about their immediate surroundings. These bodily tissues grow within the organism’s lifetime, and they’re built up from the foods organisms eat and the water they take in. 

Maybe you’ve never thought about it this way but… food and water are chemicals – and so chemistry offers a way of looking at how an animal’s bodily tissues, such as teeth, or substances made by plants, such as nodules that grow around the roots of plants, reflect the immediate environment of those organisms.