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Text and photographs by Louise
Leakey |
fter two weeks of
preparation in Nairobi we are ready to leave
for Lake Turkana. We have purchased food supplies for
three months and 200 litre drums of fuel for the
vehicles. We replaced the clutch on the supply truck
and have equipped the vehicles with new tyres. The drive to the fossil sites on the east side of Lake
Turkana takes three and half days and most of the road
is very rough. Some of our field crew had taken a
different route north, to the outpost town of Lodwar
on the west side of Turkana, and on arrival I met them with the aircraft and flew them across
the lake.
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Our
original campsite flooded and became unusable. |
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The truck arrived safely after their long journey, having
experienced only minor problems and a burst tyre.
Everyone had a day of rest at Koobi Fora on arrival
before we began the task of locating and
setting up a camp site. We located a perfect camp but
shortly after we unloaded the truck it began to
rain.
It is unusual for it to
rain at this time of year but it rained heavily and
many of the tents were soon in a small lake! The tents
had to be moved to higher ground and in the process
the truck unfortunately got stuck in a mud hole and it
took several hot and long hours to get it out. The
finishing touches were finally made to the camp which
we have
now put up close to Koobi
Fora. This is convenient as we can access the fresh
drinking water which we process from the alkaline lake
water using a desalination plant.
This season we plan to survey areas within an hours'
drive of the camp along the Koobi Fora Ridge, to
collect additional information and hopefully to find
some important hominid fossils. We have a team of 10
fossil hunters out each day looking for fossils.
We typically leave the camp early each morning after a
cup of hot tea at 6.15, taking with us plenty of
drinking water, some food for lunch which we eat under
whatever shade we can find, and our collecting bags
which contain GPS, aerial photographs dental picks,
fine brushes and other digging tools, as well as
tissue papers to wrap up delicate fossils.
This week we began survey in Area 119 near the spot where a
giant fossil tortoise was found in the 1970s and remains a field
exhibit. This is a large area and to the south of this
is Area 123 where the hominid skull ER 1813 was recovered.
We will begin work in area 123 next week and hope to
find some good bones.
Daily we are surrounded by livestock despite being in
the middle of a National Park. The National Park has
very limited resources and presently they have no
vehicles running to control the sudden influx of sheep
and goats. These animals belong to both the Gabbra and
Dasanach peoples who are pastoralists and who have
come into the park from the north and the east in
search of pasture. Livestock hooves do terrible damage
to fragile fossils lying on the surface.
Louise Leakey,
Koobi Fora
Feb. 01, 2004
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