Paleoanthropology & Paleontology

I'm enjoying a one-year sabbatical in Africa as a paleoanthropologist-in-training. In the field in the semi-desert region of the Turkana Basin in Northern Kenya near the Ethiopian border and in the laboratory at one of Africa's leading paleontological research institutions in Nairobi, the entire experience has been extraordinary. I've discovered fossils, including hominin, in a region recognized as the "Cradle of Humankind" and received instructions from some of the leading scientists in the fields of paleontology, anthropology, paleoanthropology and archeology.

Paleontology (a term originating from the Greek language: "palaeos" = ancient, "to on" = that which is being, and "logia" = study) is the scientific study of ancient life and includes the study of fossils to determine the organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments.

Anthropology (a term also originating from Greek: "anthropos" = man, and "logia" = study) is the scientific study of humanity. It is truly interdisciplinary by incorporating research methodologies from the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences.

Paleoanthropology (with the addition of the Greek word "palaeos" = ancient) combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology in the scientific study of species ancestral to modern humans.

Hominins (the colloquial word for the scientific term Hominini) are members of the animal tribe comprising the genus Homo, including its only surviving species Homo sapiens, and all extinct ancestors of that genus.

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Farewells

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FarewellsMy one-year stay in Africa is coming to a close. The day has arrived for saying farewell to my colleagues and friends at the Museum. It has been a terrific time and a great privilege to experience the land and the people of Kenya for a full year. Along the way, I've learned so much about myself and about the origin of modern humans.

Wangu wa mwaka mmoja wa kukaa katika Afrika ni karibu kuja. Siku imefika kwa kusema wakina wenzangu na marafiki katika Makumbusho. Imekuwa ni muda kali na fursa kubwa na uzoefu wa ardhi na watu wa Kenya kwa mwaka mzima. Njiani, nimejifunza mengi kuhusu mimi mwenyewe na juu ya asili ya binadamu kisasa.

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A boy from Turkana

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Nariokotome BoyYes, I'm actually holding the original cranium of one of the most famous fossils in the world. It's a male boy, catchily nicknamed "Turkana Boy", who died 1.6 million years ago. His fossilized skeletal remains were found nearly complete near the Nariokotome River in the Lake Turkana Basin in 1984. The individual is ancestral to our own species, being assigned to the Homo erectus respectively Homo ergaster species. One of the interesting facts gleaned from the "Boy" is that his rate of growth was much faster than of modern humans. The current hot issue is whether the specimen shows any congenital pathologies. A recent Swiss study has found no evidence for such pathologies but instead indications of a misalignment of the vertebral column suggesting a herniated disk, which may have contributed to his death.

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The world is 3-dimensional

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PhotogrammetryUpon request and out of gratitude for the visiting rights, I'm delighted to present two seminars for staff of the National Museums of Kenya closely related to my own work and, hopefully, useful for current and future projects in and with the Museum.

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Little time left at base

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Turkana Basin Institute TurkwelI'm enjoying the last days in our base camp near the Turkwel River. Since the construction of this permanent compound by the Turkana Basin Institute, the fossiliferous areas of the West side of Lake Turkana have witnessed a steady stream of visiting international teams of scientist doing field research in this very remote but visually stunning area. The photo on the left shows me with some of the Kenyan crew.

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Pieces to the Australopithecus puzzle

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South TurkwelHill crawls and surface sweeps are very laborious survey techniques designed to recover every tiny piece of fossil on the ground. At the Pliocene locality at South Turkwel, the crew was tasked with finding additional Australopithecus remains. The first species in that genus, Australopithecus anamensis, is possibly ancestral to modern humans and bipedal in ability but uncommitted to that form of locomotion. Fossil morphology suggests that A. anamensis was partly arboreal. Indeed, tree climbing remained a key behavioral trait in early hominins until the appearance of the first Homo species around 2.5 million year ago. The species shares many traits with Australopithecus afarensis (the specimen nicknamed "Lucy" being its most famous representative) and may well be its direct ancestor. Recent stratigraphic sequencing dates A. anamensis to between 4.1 and 4.2 million years ago.

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Searching for the last common ancestor

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Napudet HillsThe geological period of the Miocene, from 23 to 5.3 million years ago, represented a brief respite in the general cooling trend of the last 34 million years. The African continent collided with Eurasia in the Turkish-Arabian region. The Mediterranean Sea completely dried out from the resulting mountain building and fall in sea levels. The mid-Miocene Climatic Optimum saw the emergence of modern faunal families and the re-introduction of primates on the Eurasian landmasses. Indeed, the Miocene plays a prominent role in the evolution of the human branch of the Great Apes. The fossil record on early apes, however, is rather scant. Molecular evidence suggests that the human lineage split off at the end of the Miocene around 5 to 9 million years ago. Still unclear is which of the extinct apes, documented as fossils, is the last common ancestor of Homo (humans) and Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos). To try to find out, we surveyed a fossil-rich Miocene site near the Napudet hills.

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Discovering hominins

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KangatothaInitially, we thought that the sediments around an area adjoining the Turkwel river near the small settlement of Kang'athota would be early Holocene, i.e. around 11'000 years old. However, after sensationally discovering two robust partial frontals, the front part of the skull, during an initial survey, we knew that the sediments in the area must be much older than thought. Subsequent comparison with late Pleistocene material back in the base camp confirmed that the two specimens are from early human ancestors (hominins), possibly Homo helmei (around 260'000 years old) At the site, I also discovered both a central shaft and a proximal articulation of a hominin tibia. We eventually decided to dig four test pits, unearthing some interesting human ancestral artifacts and animal fossils, which should help to further characterize the site and constrain its dating.

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Exploring Lothagam

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LothagamLothagam is a famous paleontological site on the West side of Lake Turkana about an hour's drive from our base camp. The site is very rich in fossils of extinct fauna which roamed the landscape as far back as 11 million years ago. Important fossil specimens of early primates have been found at Lothagam as have some isolated pieces representing the hominin clade, including suspected remains of the Ardipithecus genus. The biostratigraphy indicates that the area had a large, low-energy river with surrounding woodland, which successively got replaced by open grassland. We spent two full days at Lothagam exploring the Miocene and Pliocene sediments.

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Landing on Central Island

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Central IslandCentral Island in the middle of Lake Turkana was formed by volcanic activity. It's known as the home of hundred of crocodiles, and we certainly saw some very large individuals. We landed on the island with three boats on 3 February 2013 at 10:00 a.m. with the aim of exploring the two larger crater lakes.

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Traveling back to the Frontier

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Turkana BasinTraveling back again to the Turkana Basin felt great. The Basin is a frontier on many fronts. It is home to pastoralists, who eke out a living from a region characterized by arid scrubland and desert. It also represents the leading edge of scientific research into the origins of humans and the evolutionary history of modern fauna. Nowhere else on the planet is the fossil record of the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs as well controlled and continuous as in the Turkana Basin. The fossil record contains specimens of each of the major lineages of human ancestors and provides strong evidence of a spurt of adaptive radiation in hominin species around 2.5 million years ago.

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Biodiversity in extreme environments

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Lake ElementaitaLakes Elementaita and Nakuru are soda lakes in the southern part of the East African Rift. High concentrations of carbonate salts makes them both very alkaline with pH values typically above 9. The high alkalinity arises from a unique combination of climatic and geological conditions. Both lakes exhibit high rates of evaporation, leaving behind large amounts of carbonate salts dissolved from the surrounding rock formations. They represent extreme aquatic environments and, hence, are useful models for lake systems with comparable environments of the deep past.

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Swiss Ambassador's Visit to the NMK

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Scientific CollaborationI thought it useful that both National Museums of Kenya staff and Swiss Embassy guests have some background information on current and potential future Swiss engagement in (East) Africa in the sciences in which the National Museums of Kenya is active. I'm keen that Swiss-Kenyan scientific cooperation increases both in depth and in breath. The National Museums of Kenya, with its evolving research portfolio, its organizational nimbleness and its sizable cadre of PhD-/MSc-level staff, is well placed to offer interesting opportunities for Swiss research teams and individual researchers.

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National Museums of Kenya

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The National Museums of Kenya (NMK), established in 1910, is one of Africa's leading institutions for scholarship, research and outreach in paleontology, archeology, ethnography, botany, zoology, biodiversity, conservation and tropical medicine. Its mandate includes the management of all major museums, sites and monuments of the Republic of Kenya. It is the custodian of world's largest collection of early hominin fossils: close to 1'000 individuals illustrating the most complete record of human evolution going back 7 million years. The paleontological collection houses a further 200'000 vertebrate, invertebrate and plant fossil specimens representing different geological epochs of Earth as far back as 34 million years. The NMK supports a cadre of PhD-level Kenyan scholars and regularly hosts scientists and researchers from leading universities and research organisations throughout the world for collaborative projects.

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Mary Mount Secondary School, Molo, at Kariandusi

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Mary Mount Secondary SchoolJohn Mwangi of the National Museums of Kenya welcomed over 120 pupils of Mary Mount Secondary School Molo at the Kenyan archeological site at Kariandusi near Nakuru. Yang Deming and I helped out. The pupils were given a short introductory lecture by John followed by a tour of the key areas of the extensive excavation site and the knapping of Obsidian volcanic glass into small stone tools. For lunch, we slaughtered two goats, which the pupils skinned with their Obsidian tools and cut up for barbecuing.

The event was so successful, both as a learning experience for the pupils as well as an outreach activity for the Museum, that John decided to launch the "Expedition to Prehistoric Sites" programme to offer site visit opportunities to other educational, civic and corporate groups throughout the country. I'm advising him in the design and execution of the programme.

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Stone tools for survival

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Mary Mount Secondary School MoloWatch a short video of pupils of the Mary Mount Secondary School, Molo, starting to produce some serious stone tools at Kariandusi. Master knappers practice for years. However, our talented pupils were successful in knapping a range of sharp stone tools that were very effective in skinning the goats for lunch.

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Bringing a goat to roast

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DES VideoEvery year staff of the Department of Earth Sciences of the National Museums of Kenya come together in November for an outing. In 2012, we went to the active paleontological excavation site at Ongata Rongai. One of the nice aspects of the site is that it features a lovely large lawn nearby. In the video you can see departmental staff preparing lunch, including the roasting of a goat, and playing ball. The goat was very delicious indeed.

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Research Summary: Comparative morphology of the talus bone of Plio-Pleistocene vertebrates

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3D ModelMy research hypothesizes that with an effective "whole 3D surface ordination" technique statistically significant variation in vertebrate morphologies can be quantified even from small, isolated and feature-poor post-cranial bone elements to permit the consistent identification of genera respectively species. "Whole 3D surface ordination" is my working title for the core of this research effort: to find a new technique for using regular geometric morphometrics without resorting at all to anatomically homologous landmarks. Even the latest attempts to incorporate entire 3D surfaces in geometric morphometrics, such as Eigensurface Analysis (Polly and MacLeod), use at some step user-specified landmarks. These may not be placeable either because the bone is fragmentary or indeed does not have such features. Hence, I've chosen to test out the hypothesis with fossilized talus bones (pl. astragali, sg. astragalus) of vertebrates mainly from the Bovidae family from the limited geographical and temporal range of the African Pliocene and early Pleistocene epochs (5.3 to 1.4 million years into the deep past). Astragali have few anatomical features on which landmark points can be consistently placed but are central to locomotion and are often found during surface fossil surveys because of their compact form.

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Collecting more fossils

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Karari EscarpmentThe Karari Escarpment is part of the Koobi Fora Formation, which records stages in human evolution over a 3 million period, from ca. 4 to 1 million years ago. We surveyed and excavated mainly in the Upper KBS and lower Okote Members around the crucial age of human evolution of 1.6 million years ago. The stratigraphy is composed of "Member" strata of sediments which derive their names from volcanic ash layers deposited by fluvial activity and dated by various techniques including radiometric (Potassium-Argon and Argon-Argon) and magnetic reversal. The meandering proto-Omo river with its shifting delta and associated floodplains dominated the region at 1.6 million years and provided the backdrop of important transitions in human evolution. To better understand the context in which human ancestral populations lived, we collected a large number of fossils of extinct fauna for the purpose of further paleoenvironmental reconstruction.

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In camp

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Karari CampWe camped at Karari at a desiccated river bed where some vegetation provided welcome cover from the scorching heat during the day. Temperatures reached 45 degrees during the day and didn't drop below 15 degrees during the night. Whereas my Swiss tent was surprisingly suitable for the desert, my self-inflating and perfectly heat-absorbing mattress was not. Everybody needs to pay an entry price for the first time in the field. At least my price wasn't to get bitten by a venomous snake or scorpion, which are not too uncommon in the region. Our Kenyan colleagues did a great job in keeping the camp running. Water had to be pumped out of the ground, petrol procured from a frontier town near the Ethiopian border and food hauled all the way from Nairobi. The photo collection also shows our mobile field kitchen.

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Relocating inland

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Relocating to KarariAfter spending nearly a week collecting fossils near the Koobi Fora Spit, we relocated inland to the Karari Escarpment. The photo collection shows the range of transport vehicles. We had Range Rovers, the majority of them having seen their best days well behind them but still shrugging off the heavy punishment from the rough landscapes we traversed. We also had two trucks which transported all the field equipment from Nairobi to our area of operation. Our favorite wheels was, however, the heavy Unimog truck. The Unimog was able to climb slops in excess of 45 degrees with ease and the view of the landscape from its platform was fantastic.

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First days in Africa

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First days in AfricaI landed in Africa in the early evening of 16 June 2012. It's a poignant moment in personal history equal as an event to my arrival in the Americas by ship in the early nineties of the last century. The first scenes are somewhat iconic for the continent: huge traffic jams, no traffic rules whatsoever and cops pulling motorists over to ask for a little something. The next day saw the crew gearing up for the long North-bound trek. We loaded the trucks and off we went. The ride was rough but the impressions on the way unforgettable. Truly, I'm in the right place at the right time. We arrived at our first base camp on the Laikipia plateau near Mount Kenya close to midnight and staked out our tents for the first time. I slept rather well that first night in the bush despite the symphony of animal sounds coming from all directions.