Harvard Summer Program in Kenya Apply Online About the program As humanity adapts to crises of climate change, habitat loss and emerging infectious diseases, nowhere have changes been more acute nor responses more dynamic than in equatorial Africa. In this program, we’ll explore humanity’s longstanding links to
This past semester has been one to remember. The students learned about the Ecology of the Turkana Basin, being able to identify all the common plant species in the region and understanding how animals foraging on these plants have affected the environment. They learned about the Geology of the Turkana Basin, where each and every
After returning to TBI from an exciting camping trip, we spent the afternoon relaxing and knapping! We used the raw material we had collected in the field: though everyone put their initials on the material collected, some students decided to share what they had collected (our students were so thoughtful, but whatever happened to survival
We left TBI Turkwel Monday morning for our camping trip, from which we would be returning on Wednesday afternoon. We would be camping for two nights near the village of Nariokotome; the famous hominin site of Nariokotome boy, KNM-WT 15000, is only a few minutes away! On our drive to Nariokotome, we would be making
On Friday, we traveled to the Holocene site of Napaget, a massive and artefact-rich sand dune that overlooks the beautiful Lake Turkana. The site is about an hour away (as the lorry drives), and on the way we passed some truly impressive termite mounds, almost big enough for a person to live in (I wonder
The next morning in class, we were introduced to archaeological vocabulary, necessary to accurately understand and describe stone artefacts. We learned how to describe the physical characteristics, such as: ventral (internal) and dorsal (external) sides of a flake; cortex, or the external skin of the original rock; and negatives (signs of a flake removal) and positives
For the last module of the TBI Origins Field School, Archaeology of the Turkana Basin, we headed to the west side of the lake. On this side, the students will be living at the TBI Turkwel Research Facility which is set up very similar to Ileret. However, we are now not too far from world
Because of the successful end of our last excursion in the field, we returned to the same site to try to find other remnants of this ancient primate. When we got back, we did a hill crawl to cover the area below the find, with the thought that over time the fossil skeleton may have
In Human Evolution this week, we discussed how animals with different diets will have coinciding differences in their teeth morphology as well as in other cranial areas, such as the zygomatic and mandible. Similar dietary morphology patterns are observed in hominins as well, which can tell us a lot about both the environment they were living in