We finished up our first full work week in Kenya today! We're finally getting into a good groove with morning and evening routines, and actually got to the museum at 9am today which is my goal. :) Speaking of the museum, I'm finally going to tell you a little more about my museum research here.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm studying fossils from the site of
Olorgesailie in southern Kenya. The fossils I'm studying come from over a dozen excavations from a time horizon that's just under a million years old (992,000 years old, to be more precise). I've been studying these fossils for more than 10 years, because there's a lot of them to examine!! I have over 100,000 fossils in my database. Most of them are small and unidentifiable, but occasionally I find one that I can tell what kind of bone it is, and even what kind of animal it came from.
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| My data collection set up: trays of fossils, a small laptop, bright lights, calipers to take measurements of the fossils, etc. |
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| A closer up look at my work area |
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| Trays of fossils. And more trays of fossils. So many trays of fossils. |
You'll notice the top of the bags have a number, like 90 or 92 - that's the year that particular fossil was excavated. I'm currently studying fossils mainly from an ancient hyena den, called Hyena Hill (hence the "HH" numbers). Each card also indicates what sedimentary layer within the excavation the fossil came from, whether it's a bone or a stone, and the X/Y/Z (3 dimensional) coordinates that were recorded by a laser transit device when that fossil was actually removed from the ground. In a fun coincidence, the person who was helping to run the excavations at Olorgesailie in the early 1990s, Tom (now a professor of Anthropology at CUNY Queens College) is here now, studying even older fossils, and working around the corner from me. It's mainly his handwriting on the plastic bags!
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| This is a typical fossil from these excavations - what we colloquially called "NID"s (non-identifiable). |
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| Sometimes even small fossil bits can be identifiable. This is a tooth, although I'm not sure yet what kind of animal it's from. |
My main research focus is early human diet, so I want to know if humans (or non-human predators around at the time like lions, hyenas, or sabertooth cats) ate any of these animals. That's why this bone that I studied yesterday was so exciting! If you look closely on the right hand margin of the second photo, which is a close-up (as well as I can get with my iPhone), you can see some small horizontal white lines on the gray colored edge - those are butchery marks from a human that used a stone took to cut up the animal this bone belonged to. Smoking gun evidence of early human meat-eating! Finding these cut marks really made my day.
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| A seemingly nondescript bone... |
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| .. until I realize it has cut marks on it! |
But since this post can't be all about me, here are some photos of Toby at the Botanic Garden and playground right on the museum grounds (mostly for you, Kirsten!).
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| I didn't even realize this was at the museum! |
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| This pond had a plethora of mosquitoes and other insects in and around it |
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| Toby see, Toby do |
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| He hasn't tried out this slide... yet |
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| Toby playing on the seesaw with my friend Katie, currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, who just got back to Nairobi from doing fieldwork in northern Kenya |
And here is Toby watching a hadeda ibis get a drink of water in the museum courtyard.
Today there was a special event at the museum, where loads of school kids visited to see a wonderful educational physical theater performance about evolution called
Walking Tall, created by
PAST (the Palaeontological Scientific Trust of South Africa). I've already seen it a few times but was grateful that the Head of Earth Sciences, Dr. Manthi, let me know yesterday that Walking Tall would be performed in the museum auditorium this morning for the school kids and invited Toby and I to watch. We weren't allowed to take photos during the performance, but here is one of Toby and I sneaking out during the post-performance Q&A so I could get back to work.
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| Yes, he's wearing a skeleton shirt. #NerdMom |
While we were waiting for the last few school buses to arrive, before the performance started, the museum showed a video that featured interviews with several prominent "fossil hunters" and other Kenyans who had a variety of jobs and roles in prehistory work in Kenya. I took a few pictures while the video was on of some old friends.
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| This is Muteti, the former foreman on the Olorgesailie excavations. I worked with him for the six years I helped run the field camp there. He passed away last month, so I watched his interview with a combination of sorrow at him being gone - and happiness at seeing the wry smile he always had on his face. |
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| This is Mary, who retired as collections manager of the Paleontology lab at the museum a few years ago. I have known her for more than a decade. She's always been so kind to me and greeted me with such big hugs! |
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| This is Kyalo (Dr. Manthi), the current Head of Earth Sciences at the museum. He's very articulate and passionate about paleontology, including outreach - he started the Prehistory Club of Kenya nearly 20 years ago. |
After the performance, throngs of students descended on the Paleontology and Archaeology collections for tours.
Finally, on the domestic front, I scored the other night with a dinner that Toby kept saying how much he loved - whole wheat pasta, shredded chicken, and spinach with garlic. "Mommy, this spinach is SO good! This is my second favorite dinner now!" (It's hard to compete with mac and cheese, his favorite dinner - which is why I brought a few boxes from home with me.)
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