Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 44

Just two years into my undergraduate study of archaeology, I was lucky enough to participate in a field school at the Koobi Fora research project in northern Kenya. Run from the National Museum of Kenya and based on a landform called Koobi Fora on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana (once Lake Rudolf), the project was begun by Richard Leakey in the 1960s. Later it was run by his daughter, Dr. Louise Leakey.

Decades of research at Koobi Fora have revealed more than 200 early hominin fossils dating between about four million and 700,000 years ago. As a student, I vividly remember crawling across the baking desert and finding chips of stone eroding from an ancient lake-shore; picking one up, I realized it had been buried for more than a million years, and my career was locked in that moment.

Currently, George Washington University runs the field school in conjunction with the National Museums of Kenya; you can learn more at https://anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu/koobi-fora-field-school.

The fossils of the earliest human ancestors are in Africa so much of the fieldwork is done in countries with well-developed infrastructure (for example, roads and airlines) including South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Modern projects are normally large-scale, incorporating diverse international research teams that spend months in the field every year, on multi-decade projects. They commonly train African students as well, so that increasingly the authors of scientific reports on our past are Africans themselves.