Finally, what you all have been waiting for: the day that I discover a new hominid fossil. Well, not yet, probably not ever, but today was our first day of getting down in the dirt and excavating. Something about it felt more like making sandcastles on the beach as a kid than I expected. Except destroying sand castles? Hard to say.
We began excavation at the BK site, which is approximately 1.35 million years old and located in what was the largest river in Olduvai. It was previously excavated by the Leakeys (if you don’t already know who they are, I don’t know what you’re doing reading this), but due to their limited identification techniques at the time, they discarded a veritable graveyard of prehistoric fauna. Dr. Manuel (aka Dr. Dominguez-Rodrigo aka MDR aka I love that guy) and his team recently began excavating again, and had found relatively complete skeletal remains of many animals (including Parmularius, which is an extinct member of the Alcelaphini tribe and thus automatically cooler than all of the other fossils). A rare hominid fossil had also been found at the site many years ago demonstrating the most robust hominid physical structure that had ever been seen. While explaining this discovery, MDR pointed to the exact spot where I was standing and stated in a very nonchalant manner, “It was excavated right about… well, where Rose is.” Jaw drop.
Me literally standing on history (the spot where the hominid fossil was found).
David (who you’ll recall is the team’s rock guy) (aka geologist) led us in selecting our very own hammer stones from a nearby river bed. Stone tools in hand, we got to work chiseling away the course sedimentary layers. Unfortunately, no hominids were found. However, I did uncover several bone fragments and a quartz “flake” (a discard pounded off of a “core” stone when fragmenting stone tools). Who knows? Maybe they’ll be essential in studying the community structure of early hominids. One can hope.
After a morning full of glaring sun, dust, and backaches, we ate lunch at Olduvai then headed over to the weekly Masaai market. Within ten seconds of arriving, it became obvious that it was not a common tourist destination. We were stared at as much as we stared, and the less subtle Masaai teenagers surreptitiously took pictures of us meandering through the maze of blankets and tarps set up carrying soup, salt, shoes, and gin. We weaved through, taking care not to run into any of the goats or dogs wandering through. To show, rather than tell:
Having whatever the opposite of buyer’s remorse is about this belt 🙁
The vibes
My eyes are open in this what are you even talking about.
After the market, guess what we did?! If you guessed dug, you would be correct. I take back what I said a few days ago–THIS is the dustiest I’ve ever been. I find myself eating my words a lot lately. Better than eating dust, I suppose. It was everywhere: I became the dust, and the dust became me. And so it goes.
More excavation content, because I couldn’t resist.
More bone fragments found, more rides in the “magic schoolbus” Land Cruiser taken. Several great Tanzanian songs listened to (https://open.spotify.com/track/48gelUhKjvgOp7LhzuRFuy?si=8691cce264004e5c). More student presentations given, more methods learned. A collection of creepy yet cool trail camera photos taken of nocturnal giraffes. And yet another amazing sunset.
From dust unto dust,
Rose
P.S. Today was my methods presentation–taphonomic bias profiling. We did not have the opportunity to utilize this technique during the paleoanthropology module of the class, so I have not gone in depth on the technique in this blog. HOWEVER, taphonomic bias is present in almost all of the observations that I’ve noted for you all. Taphonomy, for those of you who don’t know, refers to everything that happens to an organism after its death (for example, fossilization, transport of remains, etc.). Taphonomic bias, specifically, refers to the differences between what is observed in the fossil record and the organisms that actually lived at the time. Some of the largest sources of taphonomic bias are organismal traits (for example, organisms without hard exoskeletons or bones like slugs will not be shown in the fossil record); body size (larger organisms are more likely to be found and identified from the fossil record than smaller ones); habitat fossilization (ecosystems near lakes/rivers with sediment deposition foster preservation of skeletal remains more so than other ecosystems); and time-averaging (the fossil record represents an average of habitats and populations over time and cannot preserve very specific instants in time). That’s a lot of information, but we’ve already been able to see a lot of it in our own work–for example, at the BK site today, only the larger and more intact fossils were able to be identified, whereas there was much less clarity (if any) as to the identify of smaller or more fragmented fossils. While we were doing our teeth survey, we also saw a large body size bias– the smallest animal whose teeth we collected was an antelope, which definitely was not the smallest animal present in that prehistoric ecosystem.
