Lake Turkana Day Four - The Leakeys

Jim Ross woke us up with a cheerful and fatherly (if not humorous) "this is your 5:30 wake up call!" It was still dark and I had only gotten about 1 hour of sleep. No time to rest, I had to prepare myself for a busy and important day.

It began with an hour long drive along with Fred, Meave Leakey, and the two students toward the site of todays field research. The long drive provided me with time to pick the brains of the two students. Both girls were very sweet and nice and it was much easier to talk to them at first than the others. I really enjoyed the few days we spent with them.

When we arrived at the site we immediately saw how rich the site was with fossils. They are literally more common than stones! The difficulty of being a fossil hunter in Koobi Fora is not spotting fossils, but identifying which ones are worth taking. There are literally millions of fossils to choose from.

There were 4 of them and 2 of us. My thought was that I would hang back and watch as scientists did their science thing and for the most part that is what happened. But Meave was so sweat and would occasionally come and explain little things to me like why they chose this fossil and not that, and what this or that meant. With such a small group in the field, it was a very intimate setting. And as I find to be true more and more each day, people are just people. You just have to get down below the things that make seem so different.

Meave is so impressive in how she can see a tiny piece of fossil and without even picking it up identify both what part of the skeleton it is and what animal it comes from. "That's an M3 molar from a Deinotherium." I could watch her work all day, she has such an eye for fossils and is obviously smart as can be.

There were two occasions in particular that were neat. Both came when a partial fossil was exposed on the ground in fragments and Fred and Meave would begin assembling the pieces to form a very complete fossil. Then they would look at the surrounding areas and before long, a jumble of stone-like fragments became a very clear fossil. It was amazing. Meave could take a 1/4 inch piece of hip bone and know exactly where it should be placed amongst the other tiny fragments.

After about 5 hours or so we went back to camp. The field team is divided into the prospectors, made of local Kenyans that have a keen eye for fossils, and scientists like Meave that follow behind them determining what to take and what to discard. Back at camp, we had lunch and then they went back to work, this time at camp, cleaning fossils and preparing the next days field maps. It is a tedious project and you really have to love fossil hunting to do it. One half day is the extent of my fossil hunting career.

Instead of sitting and watching Habiba creating maps, I joined Louise as she took her two young daughters to the lake shore. She was very sweet in inviting me to the lake and I figured that this would be as great of an opportunity as I would ever get to pick her brain and learn about field work. It was just us two, her kids and her nanny. Not to spoil the details but we spent a couple of hours just wading in the lake and talking about fossil hunting, the area, and everything else that I wanted to know. Louise is actually very nice and very personable. It is so amazing that I could spend this time with her. It really made me feel so much better and less anxious being able to shed the formalities of field life and just talk by the lake. We watched some locals catch some fish with giant nets. Finally, on the way back, she took me to Ileret, the town, where I saw how these people live, hundreds of miles from anywhere. They ran around naked, some of them and lived in tiny bomas made of whatever materials available, cardboard, sticks, grass, etc.

That night we had dinner and I felt like we were truly welcome. Meave even commented that we were the easiest guests that they had ever had. I think that everyone enjoyed a few new faces, even though we were much different than the usual faces that come through camp.

That night I said my goodbyes to Louise. I was really glad to meet her. She asked me to keep in touch and to let her know about the progress of the story. She gave us a tire repair kit as one last little thing to help. Turns out it wouldn't be such a small token of help after all.

In the end things went pretty well. I wasn't as impressive as I would have hoped to have been but we had a great time and, well, it was like I was friends of the Leakeys. How cool is that?