On our second day of archaeology, we split up to look for clues. And by clues, I mean poop. While four of our number left to do bone surveys with Dr. Charles’s team, the rest of us prepared for a very different kind of search. Loading up our measuring tapes and pipe squares, we set out for the watering hole at Survey Site Two.
We found a lot of these guys just walking around. Pretty sick!
Upon arrival, a huge bird of prey was there to say hello and welcome us to an arid pit where the scars of water lingered. Copious acacia with their sharp thorns littered the area, which was quite unfortunate for us, as you will later see. We were excited to find a wildebeest skull with fur still attached lying on the ground, but as this site had not yet been surveyed by Dr. Charles’s team, we had to be careful to leave all bones in place so as not to skew their data. The class debriefed in an abandoned Maasai boma. There, we decided the exact hows and whats of our experiment. It shook out something like so:
Research Question: Does poop density change with proximity to water?
Hypothesis: The areas in the midpoint between the water and far away from the water will be the most poop dense.
Methods: Take a transect! Every 10 feet for 200 feet, place the two-by-two pipe square on the ground to the left and right of the measuring tape and record whether or not there is poop within the square. Once completed, move 90 feet away from the next group, staying within ~70 feet of the watering hole edge, and lay your next transect out at 35 degrees NE.
As lovely as our methodology looked on paper, there were some limits. For example, those acacias I mentioned? A complete nightmare to navigate. Avoiding scratches or entanglements had us looking like world-class contortionists. It didn’t help that we were meant to be walking in straight lines for 200 feet. Another issue was one we only discovered after the fact; different groups (there were three) had various interpretations of the water’s edge and differing levels of adherence to the rules. In the end though, it was only a pilot test, so the errors weren’t of serious concern.
A dung beetle, courtesy of Scott Solomon.
Talking results, things got a bit interesting. My group, which included Rose and Kamden, found that only one sample out of 60 had no poop in it. By the time we finished our transects, we were getting pretty sick of the sh*t. We had been very thorough, maybe even more than the other groups: Kamden regularly broke open suspected dung to check if it was the real deal. With this strategy, we were overloaded by the amounts we found. To be fair, much of it was goat poop, which could have been left behind by the Maasai herds. It was still a much greater quantity than we had ever imagined, and the whole ordeal left us quite piqued.
The Shifting Sands + me, with dust in my contacts.
To recover us from our excrement excursion, Professor Solomon took us to the Shifting Sand, a singular sand dune roaming the Olduvai landscape. We climbed to the top of the sandy wonder (held together by magnetic forces if you can believe it) and gazed out onto the golden plains. Ann amused our troop by attempting to slide down, failing on two feet-first attempts but actually succeeding with a face-first roll. Her courage I applauded, but I was not keen to join her in being bogged down with sand in every orifice.
The afternoon was dedicated to presentations, a change much appreciated by the students. Trying to stomach the particulars of taphonomic bias profiling at nine in the evening after a full day is a fate I would not wish on anyone. This way, we were more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Following presentations, we finished our tooth-identification exercise and began to create an environmental reconstruction based on the results. We ended the session quite pleased with our own ingenuity, feeling like true Rice students indeed.
As we bedded down for the night, shivering from freezing cold showers, I couldn’t help but feel that I was a part of something truly amazing. After all, people can come to Africa as tourists all they like, but how many get the chance to do what we are doing? Having the chance to hold real fossils, be the ones to actually find and identify them; this opportunity seems almost surreal. I am so thankful to be here, and every new day reminds me of why.
