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I am very grateful for the support I received for my fieldwork in Tanzania and Germany. It proved to be a very fruitful experience and it would not have been possible without your generosity. My work in Tanzania included excavation at the famous fossil sites of Laetoli and Olduvai, giving me invaluable experience as a paleoanthropologist. My major project of the summer involved looking at bone tools from the site of Swartkrans that may have been used to puncture the hard outer crust of termite mounds. These fossils are providing the basis for my dissertation. I do not agree that termiting was the sole purpose of these tools and plan to conduct experiments that test whether an assortment of other tasks could produce a similar wear pattern on the end of the bone. This summer I began my research with an experiment that tested whether bone was even an efficient choice of tool for opening up a termite mound. My results were written up in a paper, again coauthored with Dr. Francis Thackeray, and has been accepted upon revision in the South African Journal of Science.My month in Germany was the perfect amount of time to gather data that is essential for my dissertation’s project design for addressing how bone tools from South Africa may have been used to forage for termites. I went to Germany in order to watch video of wild chimpanzees using tools to forage for termites that was collected by researchers at the Max Planck Institute. It was essential for my understanding of the behavior that I visited the Institute where I had access to a variety of resources, including the field researchers themselves and an IT team familiar with the coding software. I can now use what I have learned about chimpanzees to design experiments that address how hominids were using tools 1.5 million years ago.
Thank you again for giving me the opportunity to travel abroad where I was able to gain experience that will help me throughout my academic career.
Julie Lesnik’s award was provided by expendable funds from the Helen McKaig Spuhler Graduate Fellowship Endowment.