LAST DAY AT THE DIG SITE!!! YIPPPE WE DID IT, IT WAS FANTASTIC.
Today we woke up bright and early, I almost made it to breakfast on time, only 3 minutes later than 6:30. After breakfast Dr. Manuel gave us a quick crash course on how to look at bone breakage to see if there was carnivore or hominid bone breakage. Hominid bone breakage has striation in the cuts, and more of a v-cut whereas the carnivore action has more of a u-shape or clean punctures. After looking at some examples, we immediately headed to the gorge to look for bones. It was hard at first to tell the difference between green bone breakage (when the bone broke while it was still alive) or dry bone breakage (when the bone broke while it was dead/fossilized). A good rule of thumb, is that a green bone break has a spiral breakage versus a jagged pointy breakage. After filling out respective bags full of teeth, we then moved to the Archeological dig site at BK.
There we further helped exact the gorge. The quadrants at the top of the site was harder to dig through, as it had more calcium carbonate rock, and the bottom sites had softer dirt, it was like digging through soft clay versus concrete. It was a lot less daunting at the bottom sites because what they were saying of “you will feel the difference between bone and dirt, the bone is wayyy harder” was true, which I did not understand when I was at a top quadrant because everything was hard. And a lot more bone fragments were found at the top, but that is all I will say about that.
Anyways after digging, my lavender long sleeves were certifiably gray and I quickly took a shower before lunch. After lunch we headed to the museum to do the presentations. I completed my presentation on geomorphological reconstruction of landscapes, and was able to download my Tanzania evisa.
Afterwards we went back to the camp, classified our bones into hominid v carnivore activity. Spoiler: there was a lot more carnivore activity. We also went on a sunset hike and there was an insane amount of sand we trekked through. We ended the day with our last dinner here, and made plans for a speedy exit tomorrow morning, as we will have a 12 hour drive to Nairobi tomorrow.
See you in person soon!
Isabella-2024-Bovini
(the bones I collected, some with carnivore activity)
(us on the sunset hike!)
