Afarensis: Restoring Mounds and Other Fun Stuff

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Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called Transitions:The Evolution of Life His previous blog can be found here.
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Restoring Mounds and Other Fun Stuff

Category: Archaeology
Posted on: October 6, 2007 4:02 PM, by afarensis, FCD

Back in late August I wrote this post about protecting mounds in Missouri. In that post I mentioned volunteering to help in any way possible. The upshot of the email was that I was invited to help out on "Blake Mound Work Day"

Blake Mound is an unexcavated mound in Missouri. It is currently being watched over by Mark Leach - the creator of the adopt a mound program - who has permission to restore parts of the mound that have suffered damage. Members of various archaeology classes at the St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley (Dr. Fuller's students) were also on hand. Together we schlepped quite a few forty pound bags of top soil up the mound and started repairs on a section that had slumped. It was an interesting glimpse into the massive effort that went into making the mound (Disclaimer: Afarensis smokes too much and only carried six bags up, he spent the rest of the time tossing bags down into the damaged area for the guy working there and emptying them from above). As a bonus, both Mark Leach and Dr. Mike Fuller also delivered some interesting lectures about the site. Fun was had by all.

I also bought a copy of Mark's book, which I will probably do a review on...

I'll be doing some Halloween decorating today, but I do hope to get a "Know Your Primate" up either later today or tomorrow (especially since I skipped last week).

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