In Kenya, rain is a blessing. It is something to celebrate if you have rain on your wedding day. If rain is a blessing, then nature wanted to shower the last few days at the Turkana Basin Institute with signs that this was a blessed experience. As Dr. Matt Skinner from University College [...]
The Pleistocene is sometimes called the Ice Age, but ice was as rare 2 million years ago as it is today in the Turkana Basin. Instead the glaciers in the north caused the deserts and arid grasslands to expand as the ice advanced and the expansion of the forests when the ice retreated. Our early [...]
When scientists first set out to study human origins, the Victorian armchair theorists figured it was our big brains that set us apart from the animal kingdom. They expected the fossils of our earliest ancestors to have voluminous noggins but not be built for walking. This walking business would emerge after we realized how useful [...]
Human ancestors. This is why the Turkana Basin is on the paleontological map. Sure it preserves an intact record of the grassland ecosystem taking over East Africa and the immigration and local radiation of bizarre and wonderful plants and animals, but it’s the human story that draws us to Turkana. It’s not an inexplicable bias. [...]
As part of the TBI Field School students get to work on new fossil material. Well, maybe not “new” in the normal sense of that word, but they get to work with material that no one else has laid hands on or thought about because it just came out of the ground a few days [...]
Fossils usually aren’t very pretty when they come out of the ground. They’re usually caked in sediment or broken into tiny pieces that need to be reassembled. After they’ve been cleaned and put back together, the fossil is ready for interpretation, description, and display. Easier said than done. The process of getting a [...]
African mammals started out weird. When the dinosaurs bowed out sixty-five million years ago after a rough season with a few Indian volcanoes and a rough weekend with an asteroid near Cancun, Africa was already a continent adrift. Much like the modern island continent of Australia, home to unique mammalian lineages like kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, [...]
The Turkana Basin if famous for preserving the fossilized remains of our bipedal ancestors. But, there are more than fossil hominins in the rocks piled up around Lake Turkana. The remains of horses, pigs, fish, hyaenas, and hippos (lots of hippos) also tumble from the rock, providing the ecological and environmental context for the evolution [...]
It’s the little things that will make you worry when you sign up for something like the Turkana Basin Field School. Most of this blog has documented the stuff that might be expected. You sign up for a semester studying human evolution in Kenya and you hike through the desert, see a few zebra, pet [...]
A barren, rolling landscape and a ring of stones. Evidence of mysterious ritual feasts and astrological signs. The true purpose of the site long forgotten. It’s an image that conjures up ancient Celtic druids on the English heath, but ring sites aren’t unique to the early cultures of the English Isles. The Turkana Basin has [...]
The stereotypical image of the exploratory archaeologist doesn’t include a bundle of flags and a GPS. At least not for me. Maybe it includes a whip and a few Nazi’s to fight, but a less fanciful image includes a trowel, a sieve and an exotic backdrop. Now that we had made some pretty significant discoveries [...]
The point of a field school is not to go to sites where the action has politely resolved itself and examine the leavings of more experienced excavators who have sorted out the story preserved underfoot. That’s what museums are for. Or maybe really well illustrated textbooks. For the Archaeology module, Dr. Alison Brooks of George [...]
Where people go, they leave their trash. Since the Turkana Basin has been home to people for millions of years, there’s a lot of trash for archaeologists to pick up. The classic image of archaeology is the studious excavator sweating with trowel in hand in a meter-by-meter square trying to figure out how a piece [...]
The Turkana Basin Field school has switched timescales again. In ecology we were learning about the rapid impact modern humans are having on our environment, particularly in the Turkana Basin. In Geology we stepped way back to take a longer view of the basin’s evolution, starting with the Cretaceous rocks of the Basin (about 70 [...]
Lothagam was too expansive, too important, and just too beautiful to be limited to a one-day visit or one blog post. As usual, the students rose with the dawn, the red rocks of Lothagam radiant with scarlet light. Quickly the nets and bedrolls were packed away, boots were laced, sunscreen applied, and we [...]
Lothagam isn’t a name that comes up very often in Physical Anthropology classes. It wasn’t a name a lot of the students on the field school knew before they came out to TBI. But over the last few weeks there was a building drumbeat: Lothagam: the lonely hill on a distant horizon. Lothagam: the oldest [...]
Geology is often viewed as the study of the past, of what happened to get the planet to this point. But many geologists are equally interested in the future, using information collected on climatic, tectonic, and biological change to figure out where the planet is headed. Dr. Bob Raynolds, research associate Denver Museum of Nature [...]
The shifting scale of geological inquiry can give you spatial and temporal whiplash. You go from scrutinizing a tiny quartz crystal to trying to sort out the arrival of a massive inland sea or go from contemplating a single layer of ash that took a few minutes to fall to an entire formation that took [...]
Geology is the foundation science. Pun intended. It is the study of how everything we can lay hands on came to be. Geology draws from every investigative discipline – physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology and a lot more ologies – to examine the wheres, whens, and whys of mountains, water, and us. But before a geologist [...]
In the middle of Lake Turkana, an experiment is taking place without a single person touching a pipette or checking their controls. The open-air lab is called Central Island, and few people have had the opportunity to watch the experiment in action.