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The crew remove medium- and
large-sized rocks from a section of road through Sibiloi National Park.
The KFRP team work closely with the Kenya Wildlife Service in Sibiloi
and are responsible for much of the maintenance in the park. |
MORE PHOTOS
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WEEK 8 |
Text and photographs by Louise
Leakey |
e are still working in Area 123 and
although we are finding fewer specimens, as they have
for the most part been found and recorded or
collected, there are still a few surprises. A
beautiful
monkey specimen
with several upper and lower
teeth was found by Robert, scattered amongst the
pebbles of sandstone and calcrete. These are very
difficult to find unless you are looking very
carefully. We screened the area carefully and
recovered three more teeth and several fragments of
tooth roots as well. Prospecting for fossils has
slowed down because we have to first finish excavating
and screening the sites where hominid
fossils have so far been found. Once we have this work done we
plan to move into a new area and to look for some more
good bones. Its slow hot work doing the sieving and so
far no additional hominid fragments have come out of
any of the screens. Meave has to travel to the USA to
do some lectures and to get to a few meetings, so we
spent a few days this week going over the different
sites and specimens that needed excavating in Area
123.
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The
KWS in Sibiloi pose by their new boat, the Eregai,
donated as a much-needed tool to combat illegal
fishing in Lake Turkana. |
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The weeks are getting hotter and
hotter! It’s fine when the wind blows but when it
stops it is as if we are in a pottery kiln! I spent a
day this week helping KWS launch a boat that had been
generously donated to Sibiloi National Park by the
International Fund for Animal Welfare.
It is to be used to patrol the shoreline and Central
Island and control the illegal fishing in the National
Park waters. We flew across the lake with oil, the
propeller and fuel and made her ship-shape. There was
a big group of people on the shore to help carry her
into the water, but only after we had given her a name
by the people on the beach. She is now called Eregai,
the local Turkana name for the ‘wait-a-bit’ thorn
trees that are found in the area. KWS have since been
on patrol along the shoreline and the fishing boats
will now have to look out!
At the end of the week we had brought in a good
collection of fossils, photographed them and packed
them away and we had to load into the plane again to
return to Nairobi so that Meave could catch her flight
to America. She will be back again at the end of the
month. We left the team working on the sieves to try
to finish off the work so we can move into a new site
on my return. They had a big job this weekend of
fixing all the
flat tyres
that we have accumulated
over the last few weeks. It’s a hard job fixing a
Land Rover tyre—you have to get into it, extract the
inner tube, find the puncture and fix it with a patch
and some rubber gum before you put it back and pump
air back into it with a foot pump. Despite the hard
work they are in
great spirits!
Louise Leakey,
Koobi Fora
March, 2004
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PROJECT DESCRIPTION: The Koobi Fora Research Project annual
paleoanthropological expedition. |
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LOCATION:
The area surrounding Lake Turkana, in the
extreme north of Kenya. This region is
extremely rich in hominid fossils and has
produced some of the oldest dates for Homo.
Launch
Position Locator. |
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PURPOSE:
To increase knowledge of the origins of our
genus, Homo, and the context in which
we evolved. |
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