We have begun the field season and therefore Sunday was a busy day spent going over the modern bone collection and the hominin casts that are at the TBI field station. Francis and Meave Leakey ran an excellent refersher class for us preparing us well for finding fossils in the field. We had verious identification tasks to complete and an opportunity to discuss and ask questions.

We have also been working through some of the collections from previous years, identifying and labelling the specimens as they are being put out in trays ready for preparation.

We are now going out each day looking for fossils, while some of the team continue with training on preparation in the laboratory.

I am at last back at the Turkana Basin Institute field station at Ileret and there has been progress in the laboratory over the past six months.

While I was away the outside roof of the lab veranda was partly blown off by a twisting dust storm. As you can see from the picture it must have been quite a whirl wind to have picked that roof up.

It has now been properly secured and has been repaired in such a way that it will not happen again.

Indoors, stacks of shelves have been built which means that we can get the collections out and into trays lined with foam so that they are easy to study and prepare.

Preparation requires skill and care. Specimens must be carefully cleaned with dental picks, brushes, thinners, hardeners and many of these specimens are very delicate. TBI has engaged a top National Museum of Kenya preparator, Christopher Kiarie, to train some of the field crew from Ileret. These collections are then given National Museum accession numbers and are part of the national collection.

Christopher is working on a specimen in the lab while training.

The preparators understand the importance of these fossils. For the first time, they are being trained to clean the specimens using the airscribes and microscopes in the laboratory at TBI. The fossil preparation will provide year round employment for a group of preparators and therefore acts as an incentive to protect this global heritage.

Some of the hippo mandibles laid out for cleaning in the laboratory.

Work had been continuing at the f6671 site through to the end of October.  The excavation has been subdivided into ’sectors’ and we were working on the sectors E, G and H.

We took the levels down several layers (it is important to go very slowly so we don’t damage anything insitu).

We used shade netting to shield us from the hot sun for the most part however towards November we had the occasional rains which disrupted our work. We would then get on with wet sieving some of the dirt that we carted from another excavated site in area 131 where we worked earlier this year.

Both Meave and Louise made site visits to check on the progress. The excavtaion remains unfinished and will have to be retruned to again in the New Year.

Seasons greetings from  Nzuve and the team!!

Each day begins early and with hope and expectation. Searching carefully and concentrating on finding fragments of fossil is the way to success.

Then the thrill of discovering something; and these can be interesting moments too. Suddenly it becomes everyone’s business. Animated discusion and argument often follows. After all no crew member wants to live with the thought that the piece he  ignored was actually a hominin. Therefore it is normal practice for the crew to discuss the more challenging identifications.

Hopefully leading to concensus and agreement. Identification requires a basic knowledge of anatomy. The collection team do the more detailed identification ad descriptions.

The collection team then deposit the specimens in the camp where more photographs are taken. Fossils are then properly packed in secure boxes for onward transport to the main camp where initial preparation can be done.

There is usually company out there. These little children take a break from herding their goats to see what it is that we are up to.

Hopefully they will become the fossil hunters of tomorrow.

As the season closes we reflect on the past three months.

It was a most picturesque camp site, devoid of crawling creatures save for one or two snakes and a very ocassional scorpion. Sometimes the wind was so strong one had to worry about holding the tent together but this was all- no matata.

In the last week of the field season, at the the TBI Ileret field station some 40 km away, the 5th Human Evolution Workshop was ongoing. It was a big success.

So we bid Karare goodbye for the time being at least

However leaving behind our two long time friends (whom we never quite managed to give names) was the hardest part. They just showed up one day, just like that and true to form, dissappeared on our last day in camp, just like that!

I hope to to be able to again when I return to the field after a much needed break, but do still keep it here for updates from this part of the world. And as my colleagues in the ‘gang’ would say, kwaheri ya kuonana (till we meet again).

The crew has been working hard prospecting and have found many specimens, some of which were collected and brought back to base.

Marlijn; a graduate student from UCL and Jamie an undergraduate student from Oxford process some of the finds at the field station

For the specimens that need further preparation the new laboratory at the TBI base has been very useful. Here the work benches are equipped with compressors and microscopes so that more detailed cleaning and preparation work can be done on specimens before packing them away.

Robert at the TBI laboratory

Some specimens in line for preparation

Quite a bit of sieving has been done by us in the last couple of weeks and of course the discoveries have grown. We are now doing a hominin specimen sieve that I covered some time ago in an earlier blog. This is indeed one of the largest sieve areas we have had to work on since we started the work

This particular sieve is extraordinary because the original specimen was embedded on a sandstone rock and every single rock now has to be examined thoroughly even before the actual sieve can be done and the hours we are spending sitting have now grown! However, hope is high and as usual our patience now appears to be our best weapon at the moment and are not about to give up. So far at least a single bone fragment has marched with our original specimen and that is indeed remarkable.

In my earlier posts I have covered some of the fossils and how they have been found. Here are some of the views of the area in which we are working. The terrain is quite rugged and challenging. The crew travel the winding paths down to the exposures each morning reminding me of the desert caravans of very early expeditions.

The crew walking out with their water containers to the field

And then we get to collecting and recording the specimens. However its more entertaining to picture the people taking the photographs!

Drs Fred Spoor (standing), Matt Skinner (in near squat) and Dominic

Dr Spoor taking a picture.

And then there is the time after lunch.

A siesta under the salvadora

And occasionally we find some rather extraordinary specimens. Here is a sandstone moulded by nature perhaps her most artistic mood…

Nzuve poses next to a sandstone which resembles a bizarre cranium complete with eye sockets and nasal bone

Robert’s discovery last week deserves a mention. Lying close to a dry channel near where KNM-ER 1470 was found in the 1970s, this hominin femur has remained, embeded in a sandstone. A group of the crew had been walking here for several days but had failed to spot it.  The legendary hominin hunter Kamoya Kimeu used to advise the team-(and he does know) that one must search every single inch of terrain if you want to find a good bone. If you walk towards the sunrise in the morning, then you must walk back over the same ground and walk towards the sunset in the afternoon.

The hominin specimen as it was found

The excavation began and for many hours the excavators squatted next to it working away at removing the sediment leaving a pedastel ready for plastering.

Nzuve(away from camera),Robert(lying on the ground) and Nyete excavating the hominin

The fragile specimen was then plastered, and the crew could then carried it back to the car.

plastering the find; Nyete and Robert

Robert has once again distinguished himself as a fossil hunter to reckon with. His infatiguable face shows that this is not his last card!

The size of the collection is growing and this week several more amazing specimens were recovered. A crew member discovered the back of an antelope skull. When the collection team began to excavate it a complete piece of horn hore was recovered and the opposite horn core was still attached. It is the most complete specimen that has been found this field season.

The collection team took a long time to carefully excavate and apply a hardener to it.

About a kilometer away they found a massive humerus of an extinct elephant. Below you can see the large bone at the feet of a person standing beside it.

Dube standing next to the elephant humerus

This specimen was a little broken in places but with some glue and hardener it should be stuck back together successfully in the laboratory back at the Turkana Basin field station at Ileret.

The broken elephant humerus