The students are now well into the Vertebrate Paleontology course with Dr. Bill Sanders from the University of Michigan. Professor Sanders has been teaching the students how to interpret the skeleton and teeth of animals in order to understand how they lived. You can understand a lot about an animal based on its bones. The [...]
Ancient DNA recovered from fossils is a valuable tool to study evolution and anthropology. Yet fossil DNA has not been found yet in any part of Africa, where it’s destroyed by extreme heat and humidity. In a potential first step at overcoming this hurdle, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and [...]
The discovery in Kenya of a remarkably complete fossil ape skull reveals what the common ancestor of all living apes and humans may have looked like. The find, announced in the scientific journal Nature on August 10th, belongs to an infant that lived about 13 million years ago. The research was done by an international [...]
Ryan and Morgan at the Napudet Hills (photo credit: Dorien de Vries). Dr. Craig Feibel talks about the geological setting of the Miocene deposits in the Napudet Hills (photo credit: Dorien de Vries). Last Sunday, the students joined another group of visitors (part of the Academic Safari program hosted by TBI) [...]
(Left to right) Dr. Sawchuk, TA Evelyn, Karolina, Adrianne, and Cecilia working hard on the bioarchaeology unit We’ve returned from the field! Yesterday afternoon we returned to the TBI Turkwel Campus after the 9-day excavation for the Archaeology module. Everyone enjoyed their wonderful TBI shower, dinner, and beds after roughing it in the [...]
(Counterclockwise from bottom left) Petra, Sheng, Karolina, Nathan, Kelly, Ian, and TA Evelyn watch as Dr. Lisa Hildebrand discusses how to recognize stone tools. This week our students have started their second module ‘Archeological Methods’, taught by Dr. Lisa Hildebrand. The first three days were spent bringing the students up to speed on [...]
It can get pretty hot here in Turkana, so this weekend the students made two separate trips to the massive East African rift lake to cool off and take a well-deserved break from their first module. On Friday and after a week full of lectures, lab activities, and assignments, the whole group loaded up in [...]
Welcome to our second blog post! The students have now arrived at Turkwel, the Turkana Basin Institute Research facility on the West side of lake Turkana. Before we made our way out here, we spent our remaining time at Mpala studying the ecology of African bushlands. The students listening to a lecture by Dr. [...]
As paleontology neared the end, students were able to demonstrate what they learned throughout the course by designing research experiments. These projects focused on a wide array of paleontological methods and topics including excavation, tooth wear, and how an animal's chewing rate correlates with its body size. The students worked quite hard on these projects [...]
Our Origins Field School students observe a pack of African wild dogs at Mpala Research Centre in the Laikipia region of central Kenya.
Stony Brook University professor John J. Shea recently published a new work through Cambridge University Press entitled Stone Tools in Human Evolution: Behavioral Differences among Technological Primates. From the publisher's description: In Stone Tools in Human Evolution, John J. Shea argues that over the last three million years hominins' technological strategies shifted from occasional tool use, [...]
The next morning in class, we were introduced to archaeological vocabulary, necessary to accurately understand and describe stone artefacts. We learned how to describe the physical characteristics, such as: ventral (internal) and dorsal (external) sides of a flake; cortex, or the external skin of the original rock; and negatives (signs of a flake removal) and positives [...]
After learning about the primary producers (vegetation) and their primary consumers (herbivores), we moved on to discuss those animals higher up the food chain. Carnivores play crucial roles in ecological systems – they keep prey species’ populations in check, allowing for natural regenerating of grazed areas on the landscape. They also cull sick animals to [...]
The Turkana ecosystem is home to a wide range of species, including many different kinds of insects. One of the challenges of understanding biodiversity is the fact that many species have not yet been classified, and are in general poorly known or studied. This is true for most of the remote, tropical areas of the [...]
We had a high profile visit a few weeks ago at TBI-Turkwel and TBI-Ileret by the Deputy President William Ruto, Dr. Hassan Wario, Minister for Cultural Heritage and Sports, the Governor of the Turkana County, Governor Nanok and several senior government officials. The visit was at the invitation of Richard Leakey. They visitors arrived by helicopter in [...]
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 [...]