Hi blog. Yesterday, we visited an Olduvai Gorge excavation site. It was so cool!! Finally, we’re getting right into the biological anthropology / archaeology side of this trip! We started the morning with a tour of the Olduvai Gorge museum led by Dr. Dominguez Rodrigo. It was so cool to have a personal tour of all the bones by someone who is involved with the excavation of alike objects. It reminded me how much I missed taking Dr. Dominguez Rodrigo’s biological anthropology class. He talked to us about how bipedalism emerged six million years ago with Miocene apes, but it was still accompanied by other forms of locomotion.
After the museum tour, Dr. Dominguez Rodrigo showed us a current project and told us that every bone at the site would be marked with a red flag, and every stone tool with a blue flag. When I looked into just one 2 foot by 2 foot ish square, there were probably over a hundred little flags marking individual objects. It surprised me how many significant, preserved objects could be present in just one small square of land.
^Hard to see, but this is a little square of earth with dozens of pins inserted into the ground marking million year old fossils and stone tools.
After the site tour, we ended the day by going to a lodge and resting. We got some cold drinks, chatted, and briefly explored the landscape of the lodge. The lodge was built into a pride rock, which I found out is a result of exposed mantle in the earth’s surface. It was definitely a feat of architecture to design a lodge around a pride rock.
^The view from the top of the lodge’s pride rock
As for my taxon group, I don’t think many giraffes were spotted. It wasn’t a very giraffe-rich day, and, as always, no pangolins or aardvarks were spotted. Maybe one day!
^Carina and I spotted a black mamba at the campsite and then took a nap next to it. We were unaware that it was a black mamba until after we left Africa. We had our phones up in its face, and it was coming down the tree to eat a bird it had killed. We stood in between the black mamba and its food and it miraculously didn’t attack us. Oops.
^The gorgeous night sky at the Olduvai camp
Hopeful about pangolins,
Kacey
