I played with fossils!!!!

Mr. P.

I thought I would start off today's post with Mr. P. (or is it Mr. Pea? I could never get confirmation from anybody), the peacock who strolls around the grounds and gardens of Quex House and Park. I realized I didn't get around to mentioning him in my last mega-post, and it was an omission keenly felt. There were a few relatively sunny days (remember, this is England, so amount of sunlight is DEFINITELY relative) where Julia and I decided to have lunch outside, and Mr. P. always came by begging for food. Julia was happy to throw him little tidbits of salad, fruit, and - once - a piece of chicken (I know. Apparently Mr. Pea has no Family loyalties. And yes, I had to look up how closely chickens and peafowl are related - they are both Galliformes. Taxonomic lesson of the day? Check.), but I was afraid to give him anything because I could just see him choking on it and then I would forever be known as the researcher who killed the Quex Peacock. And nobody wants that nomen.

Mr. P. and Julia share a moment of mutual skepticism.

While we're on the subject of Quex and the Powell-Cotton collection, just in case any of my colleagues find themselves working there in the future, be forewarned that Birchington-on-sea is, shall we say, a rather small seaside town with not a whole lot going on in the off season. I frankly find it hard to believe it's really that hopping during the on season, but the locals assure me it is. (Which probably means the tourist population jumps from two to ten or something.) You've basically got one main street with the shops and restaurants (by which I mean two branches of the same grocery store, a few fish & chips and Chinese take-aways, one each fairly decent Indian and Thai place, half a dozen cafes that are only open for lunch, one rather nice English farm-to-table type place, and several pubs). Julia and I found ourselves spending part of just about every evening in Christie's pub, mainly due to 1) a nice Kroenenberg on tap, 2) the free wifi, and 3) a general lack of anywhere else to go. So, in short, my recommendation for this collection is: if you can bring along a research buddy, do it!

But enough of cold, rainy, dreary England - for the last three weeks I've been basking in the beautiful, mild, sunny weather of South Africa!! Johannesburg (or Jo'burg or Jozi) became a major city because of (and retains its prominence due to) gold mining; gold was first discovered here in the 1880s, and the fortunes of the city (and the country) have relied on it ever since. South Africa of course spent much of the twentieth century under apartheid (or apartheid-like practices before it was formally institutionalized), so although the governmentally-driven segregation and repression are technically over, huge social and economic disparities still exist between black and white South Africans. Johannesburg in particular is said to bear the scars of apartheid more than some of the other major SA cities and is thus not as popular a tourist destination as places like Cape Town, but parts of the city are definitely undergoing gentrification and/or revitalization. I'm staying in Melville, a small part of town with one major street known for its restaurants, bars, and small shops. It's a nice, walkable area, and my hosts, Alison and Andrew (and their son Adam), are great. Andrew is a psychology professor at Wits and gives me a lift into the university every day. They have been super welcoming, and I (okay, mostly the games on my iPad) have been a big hit with Adam. Actually, as I write this, he's giving me a Nat Geo kids magazine quiz about how normal you are. (Update: apparently, I'm pretty normal. Only in the world of Nat Geo...).

View of Jo'burg from Carlton Centre.

Here in Johannesburg I am back to working with human skeletal remains, and I'm using the Dart Collection, a huge collection housed in the anatomy department of the medical school of the University of the Witswatersrand (known more simply as Wits). The bones are overall in pretty good shape, except most of the ribs were cut during dissection and do not always refit terribly well. Sad face. Other than that, my data collection is rolling along, and I find it incredibly hard to believe I've essentially been doing this since June! For some reason, every time I move on to a new place I feel like I'll be able to get so much extra work done in the evenings because I won't know anyone, and every single time I underestimate my ability to meet and connect with people. On the one hand, it's great because it leads to lots of fun experiences, but it also means I'm going to have a huge pile of data to sift through come February...

Library Lawns and Great Hall, Wits

I hadn't given much thought to Thanksgiving other than the fact that I would be missing it this year (and missing the traditional pre-Thanksgiving dinner party I always throw for my NYC friends - always a great time), but after only a couple of days in Jozi I found myself with an invite to Thanksgiving! One of the professors in the department is from the States and was having a party, and she promptly invited me upon learning I too was American. Most of the crowd ending up being SA paleoanthropologists (yes, I ate turkey with Ron Clarke and Bernard Zipfel), and there may have also been ostrich carpaccio on the menu, but it was Thanksgiving!

For my first weekend in Jozi, I spent a day poking around some of the shops in Melville and taking care of errands like obtaining a local SIM card for my travel phone. On Sunday, I decided to join a group hike in the Melville Koppies Nature Reserve. The reserve is the only area in the city that actively conserves the ridges and flora of the original landscape (koppie is the Afrikaans word for small mountain, ridge, etc). There are also both Stone Age and Iron Age settlements in the reserve. The hike lasted for a little over three hours and wended its way through the eastern, central, and western parts of the koppies, and luckily it was a beautiful morning. The guides were very knowledgeable and pointed out many unique plants, such as the 'underground tree' whose roots and trunk are, as the name implies, all beneath the surface, while the terminal branches and leaves basically spring from the ground.

View from Melville Koppies East

 

Melville Koppies Central.

Another aspect of the varied koppies landscape.

In the biggest news of my South African adventure, last week I was lucky enough to score an invite to the fossil site of Rising Star. For those of you outside the paleoanthropology world, Rising Star is a new cave site located outside of Johannesburg in the Cradle of Humankind that in its first few weeks has already yielded over 1,200 hominin (human ancestor) fossils. To put that in perspective, it is an absolutely staggering amount of material for ANY fossil human site, and with further excavations will probably end up being the most prolific hominin site EVER. The cave was found by recreational cavers, who happened to mention it to a geologist friend at Wits University, who happened to mention it to Lee Berger. After securing funding for a preliminary investigation, the call went out for small humans with caving and excavating experience, and several short female anthropologists were selected to excavate the cave. With National Geographic funding the expedition, there was lots of $$$ to spend on things like multiple cameras down in the cave system so that everyone above ground could watch the excavations in real time.

Cave entrance, with the bundle of blue extension cords powering all of the video cameras down below.

The main chamber with the fossils is pretty open, but to get there the excavators have to essentially squeeze/inch through a 22 meter long tunnel. The whole thing is just absolutely wild, and the amount but also the state of the fossils is amazing. I went out to the site at the invitation of Scott Williams, an NYU professor (and one of my PhD committee members!) who is working on the project. I drove out to the site with Jason, one of the lecturers at Wits, who happens to be friends with one of the cave excavators. We had intended to just tour the site, but there was so much work to be done that Scott asked if I was willing to help out for a bit - so I got to play with fossils!!! New fossils!! I spent several hours helping Scott sort, identify, and catalog fragments of bone. It was pretty fan-freaking-tastic. Imagine sitting in stiflingly hot canvas tent under the highveld afternoon sun playing with bones. Awesome, right?! Of course right!! Incredible, even. Just incredible. Hard to believe that they've barely scratched the surface of what's down in the cave, too. The preliminary field season has now ended, but you can read about it here in the Nat Geo blog if you're interested (but stay away from the comments section because people are nutty).

Scott and his knife at the site of his (un)heroic stab wound - the entrance to the Science tent. (Science goes on inside this tent. You can tell from the sign. Stabbing yourself in the leg is generally not part of Science, but on this day it was.)

The Command Center tent of Rising Star

After our (awesome) day at Rising Star, Jason and I decided to visit the site of Sterkonfontein on our way back to Jo'burg. Over the last seventy years or so Sterkfontein has yielded some of the most famous of the South African fossils, including Sts 5 (Mrs Ples) and Stw 573 (Little Foot). As with the majority of South African paleo sites, Sterkfontein is a set of limestone caves. Most of it was blasted out by miners and so is pretty open, but even knowing that going in I was still not expecting the sheer scale of the place - it's impressive. To view the cave you have to be part of a guided tour, and although we didn't really need anyone to explain to us the importance of Mrs. Ples for human evolution, the guide did do a good job and had some interesting anecdotes to tell.

Sterkfontein, inside the entrance.

Locked entrance to the Silberberg Grotto, home of Little Foot.

Underground lake, Sterkfontein.

Emerging from the Sterkfontein caves, leading up to Member 4.

Member 4 - the small plaque in the middle marks the find location of Mrs. Ples.

View from Sterkfontein across the Cradle of Humankind - Drimolen and Kromdraai are both in the distance.

This past weekend, I joined Andrew for the 5K Parkrun in Rietvlei Park on Saturday morning. Parkrun is a really cool organization that holds free 5K runs every weekend; you can register online and get a bar code that tracks all of your runs. Andrew recently got his 'red shirt' for completing 50 runs, so he was super excited to wear it that morning for the first time. The Rietvlei course is essentially trail running and even though it started at 8am, it was still HOT. One thing I learned that morning - scratch that, two things - 1) Johannesburg is located in the highveld region of South Africa, which means it is 5,751 feet (1,753 m) above sea level, and 2) it is REALLY hard to run at 5,751 feet above sea level when you are out of shape. But, even though my time was not impressive, I did manage to run the whole thing, so that felt pretty good.

In the afternoon, I joined Andrew, Alison, and Adam for the Christmas Market in Parkview. Vendors set up tents for the weekend with all kinds of crafts and such to buy; there was also a large stage that throughout the day hosted performances ranging from a middle school girls marimba band, a high school girls drumming and dance performance, a kid on a trumpet working his way through 'O Come All Ye Faithful,' some cheerleaders, a comedian, and a guy auctioning off a giant watermelon for charity. If I thought the morning run was hot, man, by the afternoon it was toasty. I sat in the shade with Adam for a while to watch some of the performances, but eventually we all retreated to the champagne and oyster tent and a good time was had by all.

I'll end today by saying farewell to Madiba - it's definitely a profound time to be here in South Africa. I'm glad I had the chance to come here and learn more about his extraordinary life. What a place this world could be, with more people like him, hey?

Hero.