I Got to Meet Richard Leakey!

Day 8
6:30 Breakfast
7:00 Leave for Olorgesailie with Archeology Class
1:00 Lunch
5:00 Natural History Class
6:30 Dinner



Olorgesailie

Making Flints

   The archeology class consisted of 10 of us and back at Olorgesailie our professor did a lecture on flint and stone tools. Olorgesailie is most known for the vast number of hand axes found there. The majority of the excavation at that site was overseen by Mary and Louis Leakey. "We all walked down to the stone creek bed to make our own stone tools. We had to go to the dried water bed because at an archeology site, it wouldn't be good to leave our poorly made flints laying around - the scientists might think homo erectus is making bad tools! In the creek they can't study or identify them because the origin is unknown as they could have come from another source." So we tried our hand at making flints (pardon the pun), it's a lot harder than it looks! "After a while and a few terrible flints later we went up to the teaching area to trace and examine our labours. We were told by our professor that our flints were pretty bad!"


Meeting Richard Leakey

   We were VERY fortunate today because Richard Leakey (the son of Mary and Louis) was at the site today and he shook my hand!! We got some pictures with him before he went off to supervise some very important things (I'm guessing). "We continued on to a recent excavation site that they're still digging. They found the first bones of homo erectus here. At the other site they found signs (like the hand axes) but never the skeletal evidence. The skull they found was around 1 million years old. We didn't get to see it because it's at a museum." I learned so much this morning 10 years ago today.


The Dig Site of the first homo erectus find in Olorgesailie