It is the end of the Archaeology module and our field school students have learned a lot about how stone tools are made. Now it is time to put this knowledge into real use! Stone knapping is not just banging rocks against each other. It takes a lot of practice and experience. The seemingly “simple” [...]
In the last week of the Archaeology module, we had a lot of adventures visiting various archaeological sites on the west side of Lake Turkana. Dr. Sonia Harmand from Stony Brook University led the expedition. Dr. Harmand has been working in the Turkana Basin for almost two decades. Her expertise in this region provided exceptional [...]
We have had a couple of rains in the last few days at TBI Turkwel and were a bit worried about our field trip to Lothagam, a fossil/archeological site ~40 kilometers (25 miles) to the southeast of TBI Turkwel. It sounds close but, we can not drive fast on muddy roads. The trip turned out [...]
We often find archaeological discoveries very attractive and a lot of them are about lost civilizations and cavemen eating each other in Eurasia or the Americas. In Africa, however, a lot of the archaeological material is from stone tools. Stone tools are a type of material culture of ancient populations that can go back millions [...]
Imagine that you are a chimpanzee foraging in the doum palm forest by the Turkwel River, and that you have all the palm nuts high up in the trees, what would you do to get them? That was exactly the question our field school students have to think about at the beginning of the Archeology [...]
The TBI Origins Field School has been a great place to learn for students. But also, it is a wonderful place to inspire scientific thinking. As an integral part of many of our modules, we often have presentations and discussions in class. At the end of the Human Evolution module, students gave presentations of their [...]
With the hope that the weather may get better this week....that hope was shattered thanks to El Niño! It has been raining almost non-stop in the last week and we were almost stuck in camp! However, we managed to visit Area 13 and 15 on the one day it did not rain! Victory at last! And [...]
It is the beginning of November and we are well into the short rainy season in East Africa. Clouds have been building up for a few weeks and we have several heavy rains so far. One good thing the rains brought us is cool air. But on top of that, we got swarms of bugs! [...]