Great Rift Valley on EARTH Magazine

Teaching geology to biologists: An essay on an interdisciplinary field trip in Africa

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 14:21:50 -0400

Jill Peterson, an Adams State student on the trip, painted this representation of the field trip. Credit: Jill Peterson.

We stop next to a wide, dry, creek bed on the floor of a steep canyon near Tarangire National Park in northern Tanzania. Elephants spray water on themselves and their companions. In the tall baobab trees on the far side of the valley, monkeys jump from limb to limb and tree to tree, over the heads of impalas that don’t seem to care. I am standing in the back of one of our open-top Land Rovers and, like the monkeys, I’m waving my arms this way and that as I discuss the geologic strata in the canyon walls. Like the impalas, the khaki-clad college students in the Land Rovers don’t seem to notice.

Homo erectus footprints show modern way of walking

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:41:58 -0500

Fossil footprint, likely left by _Homo erectus_, found in Kenya. Image courtesy of Professor Matthew Bennett, Bournemouth University

An optical laser scan shows three footprints from the _Homo erectus_ footprint trail mixed with a range of other animal prints. Image courtesy of Professor Matthew Bennett, Bournemouth University

Bennett with the trail of fossil _Homo erectus_ footprints in northern Kenya. Image courtesy of Professor Matthew Bennett, Bournemouth University

In the Great Rift Valley in northern Kenya, researchers have discovered a cluster of footprints that look almost exactly like those you or I might leave on a sandy beach. These prints, however, were left by early hominins more than 1.5 million years ago, making them the oldest known evidence of fully modern bipedalism.