Last night in my hovel I slept relatively well, however I am ready to sleep in my soft bed where I can starfish with mochi.
Today we woke up and got this bread (Editor’s note: I’m so sorry I am quite tired). Quite literally because when I made it to the breakfast line, there was only two slices left of bread in the tub, even though usually there are buckets full of bread . Something was in the air because wherever I looked there were piles of bread on people’s plates. It was great.
After breakfast we went to the field and planned out and conducted our own quick research project. We wanted to see the frequency of animal scat in the area and collectively measured 6 transects of 200 feet (a straight line of 200 feet). Each transect we observed the presence or absence of scat in a 2 ft by 2 ft area on the left and right of the transect. The left and right were measured every 10 feet for the length of the 200 ft transect. We had the transect radiating from the dried up water hole. We predicted that there would be more poop closer to the waterhole. So basically we measured 240 squares of poop. Spoiler: there was an abundant amount of poop everywhere regardless of distance from the waterhole.
(Anna, Milton, and I doing a transcet)
After that we came back to camp, and I was able to take a quick shower before lunch. I think my standards have changed, because the water was actually warm while I showered. It was almost pleasant, but then the wind blew past and I was colder than an elephant in Antarctica. (Side note: I don’t know what climate I belong in, because I genuinely think Africa may be too cold for me, I wish I brought my puffer with me on this trip). We had lunch and then started making friendship bracelets. Mine is around halfway done as I was grinding today, so we’ll see how it turns out!
We then traveled to the museum and finished our three student presentations. We also finished identifying the fossilized teeth we had collected. From that identification, we were able to theorize about what kind of landscape was at the dig site we were at, inferred from the types of animal teeth we found there. It was decided that it was an open grassland with braided water feature, and had trees nearby. Dr. Manuel also offered to help us publish a paper (where all of us in the course are co-authors??!), and in the paper we will discuss the paleo environment back then, reconstructed from data collected and experiments preformed on the teeth collected. I’ll keep you posted on how this pans out, but this is an incredible potential opportunity!
P.S. We also were able to watch the sunset over the castle rock in Olduvai gorge, from the museum that Dr. Manuel helped build, I would highly recommend it, the sun looked like a picturesque postcard of an African sunset. Additionally we also had a friendship bracelet making huddle.
(the Oldupai plant that Olduvai Gorge is named after)
Goodbye and Goodnight
Isabella-2024-Bovini
