Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 75
COURTES Y OF GO RONGO S A N AT IONA L PAR K
In 2018, after a long period of surveys,
Carvalho and Bobe began an excavation at the so-called Mazamba Formation, which lies on central Mozambique’s
Cheringoma Plateau, a stretch of upland
Miocene sandstone wedged between the
Zambezi and Pungwe Rivers. Many were
skeptical that such a damp, flood-prone
area packed with vegetation would yield
any useful fossil finds. But it did.
As a common reliquary for ancient
bones, sandstone, as the name suggests,
forms when grains of sand are compacted
together by the elements over the course
of millennia.
When an organism that dies in such an
environment is gradually interred, its soft
tissue are dissolved and replaced by quartz,
feldspar, and other minerals. Preserved
in the resulting rock are the firmer remnants—bones, shells, teeth, wood tissues.
And there they lie, subsumed by newer and
newer strata of rock, each marking a new
page on the calendar of geologic time.
The excavation site includes several
open-air digs as well as studies of deep
limestone caves whose layered sediments
offer a sweeping record of specimens dating from a more recent time when our
genus Homo had already emerged. Carvalho’s findings from the
caves include a smattering of small silica tools chipped to a fine
edge to cut open fruit or husk bark—evidence that some species of Homo dwelled here. All told, Carvalho says she and her
colleagues exhumed some 2,500 discrete fossils across all the
Gorongosa digs.
“This combination of animals is not found elsewhere in the
East African Rift system,” says Bobe. “So, we’re looking at the evolution of an ecosystem that is new to science, and it’s very, very
interesting.”
In London, Bobe rummages a jawbone out of one of his drawers at the museum and holds it up to his computer camera to
show me—a hyrax specimen slightly larger than a human hand
that was unearthed in Kenya in the 1950s by the legendary British-Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. It is similar, Bobe
says, to the hyrax remains Carvalho and her team uncovered in
Gorongosa.
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WORLDS BENEATH THEIR FEET
René Bobe and Susana Carvalho consult during a dig at Gorongosa National Park, where
they lead the park’s Paleo-Primate Project.
The project has unearthed fossils that paint a
vibrant mural of life surrounding our earliest
ancestors.
