Sites and Geology
Many fossils have been found in:
East Africa
South Africa
Europe
 Especially those Neandertal guys.
The Great Rift Valley System (East Africa)
Africa is pulling apart due to plate tectonics.
 A huge rift where two tectonic plates are pulling apart very, very slowly.
 Cuts down through Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.
o You can see this rift from space – coolio.
 You get to see fossils erode out of the walls – you get to look down centuries
because of the walls pulling apart.
Olduvai Gorge – a famous site that has been worked for a super long time, excavated mostly by
the Leakey’s.
 Louis and Richard Leakey (Father/son) plus Mary and Meave (Mother/wife of Richard)
have worked on it.
o The work has been to recover specimens – Australopithecus.
o It takes big team to walk . . . and walk . . . and walk . . . looking for fossils that
have eroded out that are human ancestors.
 Olduvai Gorge supported species that lived at different times – but also
those that lived simultaneously.
East Africa is totes legit because it has active volcano systems, which is awesome because:
 The volcano provides the use of types of dating that only work on rock that was once part
of a volcano.
 We date the rocks to figure out how old the fossil embedded in it/ next to it is.
o Date the ash layers that surround the fossil
o If the one on top is from 1.5 mya and the one below is 2.5 mya, so we know it is
from somewhere that time frame.
 Carbon-14 dating only works for up to 15 kya.
o Volcanoes are super helpful in this method because they provide very nice, even,
smooth layers of rock.
South Africa
South Africa was the first place fossils were consistently being found.
 1924, right outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, the Tome Child was found.
 Everything from South Africa comes out of these weird limestone cave systems – which
is also why fossils were being discovered early: people would go and blast the caves
mining the limestone and then find all these fossils from different types of animals.
Sterkfontein – A site that has been worked since the 1930s; an estimated 500+ specimens of
Australopithecus africanus have come out of here.
 There is one major problem with specimens found here: they are not easy to sort out
in terms of geology – the cave system makes it difficult.
o Extremely complex geology – a lot of South African caves have top entrances
that result from the eating patterns of leopards (chilling in trees that grow at
the mouth of caves while eating to avoid scavengers). This results in a talus
cone, which is a build up of all the food and bones and fossils and ickiness
that are all jumbled together and hard to distinguish from each other.
Breccia – an anthropologist/ archaeologist’s worst nightmare. A horrible cement-like solid rock
that attaches to fossils and essentially refuses to ever release them. It sucks.
 Little foot is a fossil that was found at Sterkfontein. The leg of Little Foot was
discovered in a block of rock and excavated. The excavator went and found the owner
of the leg and it turned out to be the most complete fossil of an australopithecine ever
found . . . but its been stuck in breccia . . . for 15 years. ROUGH.
Europe
Most of the stuff that goes on in Europe deals with Neandertals (early modern humans, our
genus).
Notable specimens:
 Oase (which I can never pronounce correctly for the life of me without hearing
someone say it first). Oldest direct dated modern human (35-40 kya (34,950))
o Studied by Erik Trinkaus (Wash U)
 Trinkaus had the opportunity to work on this specimen because some
random-ass people e-mailed him a picture of a mandible found on the
ground.
 Carbon-14 dating found the age to be 34,950 years old, the oldest
hominid of its kind to be found.
o The cave Oase was found in was long and winding – difficult to get into. Once
you enter the cave, you must swim through an area of water, then come up in
an air pocket. The cave looked like it was previously inhabited by cave bears
(my first response to hearing that was, “How in the world did giant cave bears
get into that cave?” My professor and I had a short discussion to clear that up,
tehe.)