8:00 Breakfast
1:00 Lunch
1:30 Goat Scraping (what?!)
3:30 Swim and Game Drive
6:30 Dinner
Today our archeology class set out to use our flints that we made at Olorgesailie. We bought a goat from the owner of the ranch and the camp staff ate the goat meat for their dinner last night. Our archaeology professor was given the carcass and head for our lesson. We were doing an experiment to see how much meat remained on the bones, and what we could get off the bones using the flint tools. We were being Homo Habilis (a species that is often found with primitive stone tools) and discussed their survival as scavengers of carcasses rather than hunters. "When we got to the dried stream bed where we were doing our experiment, Mzalendo took the body out of the bag, it was gross but fascinating too! I decided not to scrape bones so I donated my flints for others to use. Everyone else dug in. I took pictures with all their cameras, scratched itches, put on sunscreen, tied back hair - did everything required of a person with clean hands. I also helped Mzalendo make more stone tools. It was fun. I didn't feel sick watching them hack apart the skeleton. Murph and Mel took apart the head, it was pretty neat." Everyone back at camp was interested in our experiment. Afterwards we went to a waterfall. It was fresh water but because the water was moving so quickly we were safe from parasites, so we were allowed to go swimming. On the drive back to the camp we saw a giraffe and her baby running, it was quite a beautiful sight to see! 10 years ago today I learned that scavengers in the savanna can get quite a bit of meat with a little stone tool.
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