Olorgesailie 2011 Field Season

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Two women in a shaded area of the research camp, stand on opposite sides of a table sorting through many labeled plastic ziploc bags

Day 39 (August 3, 2011): Closing BOK-2

Alison, John, Katie, and Wambua work to the last minute of the excavations at BOK-2. (Jennifer Clark, Human Origins Program, NMNH) After a very productive season of over 2000 artifacts,…
Young woman in blue jeans, dark shirt and a hat sits high above on the top step of the geologic trench holding geological hammer

Day 38 (August 2, 2011): Rahab and the Phytoliths

Paleobotanist, Rahab Kinyanjui (Jennifer Clark, Human Origins Program, NMNH) We’re in our last few days of the field season, but research is still going full speed ahead. Joining us for…
interior of Paleontology Division storage and work area with many metal shelves of wooden trays and tables and counters near brightly lit windows.

Day 37 (August 1, 2011): A Day with the Teachers

The Louis Leakey Statue at the National Musuems of Kenya (© Copyright Smithsonian Institution) I drove back to Nairobi today for a morning with Kenyan teachers who are charged with teaching…
Unusual depression and runnel at Site 15

Day 36 (July 31, 2011): Putting the Beds to Bed

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 25th, you may recall that as we reached the base of the artifact layer, we couldn’t…
a woman stand in a geologic trench facing into the greyish hillside writing notes. two large mounds of brown dirt, dug from the trench, are on either side of her

Day 35 (July 30, 2011): The Life of a Soil

Naomi and I took the opportunity today to talk about ancient soils and what they can tell us.  The best way to do it was to take an excursion to the oldest soil we know of in the Olorgesailie region.  It’s at the very bottom of what we call…
A black obsidian rock chipped into a tear dropped shaped form with the #1198 painted on it. It is approximately 3 cm in lenght

Day 34 (July 29, 2011): What’s the Point?

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…
Two brightly colored (blue, green, and orange) Superb starlings sitting in the lower bare branches of bush

Day 33 (July 28, 2011): Safari in Our Backyard

Kenya is known for its abundant wildlife, so much so that thousands of tourists from around the world travel here every year to see it for themselves. Today we’ll give you a front row seat of our daily safaris, right here at Olorgesailie. …
a whitish color lake in the center of the image, in foreground: tan grassy ground with few sparse trees, in background: other side of the lake is blue rift wall, and blue sky

Day 32 (July 27, 2011): Bernie and the Diatoms

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,…
Aerial view of the Olorgesailie landscape with white and reddish brown sediment layers and deep channels and ravines cutting through them

Day 31 (July 26, 2011): Climate Change or Earthquakes?

One of the big-picture studies we do here at Olorgesailie focuses on how the landscape changed over time, all the way back to the beginning of the sediment record more than 1 million years ago.  This area of the southern Kenya Rift Valley has…