About Bonelore

Bonelore is a field guide to human origins and the ancient past, written by Patrick Johnson. It grew out of archaeologyinfo.com, a site I started with the artist Scott Bjelland in 1999.

How it started

I studied anthropology at Rutgers University from 1997 to 2000. I only signed up for an intro to archaeology class to fill a requirement, and I had no idea I would enjoy it. I fell in love with the subject. By the time I graduated, with honors, my focus was human evolution, especially the stretch from about 2.5 to 1.8 million years ago, when early Homo, the robust Paranthropus species and the first stone tool makers shared the landscape.

In 1999, after my junior year, I went to Kenya for a six-week field school at Koobi Fora, on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana. We spent the first week in the bush on the way north, watching animals and studying the land to picture what it looked like millions of years ago. Then came a three-day drive across the middle of the country to the base camp on the lake.

I lived in a tent for six weeks. We were up at sunrise, had tea and a light breakfast, then headed out to the field, a project or a lecture. The Kenyan crew cooked for us, and we washed and swam in the lake every day. There was no phone signal and nobody expected one. The wind dried your sweat before you noticed it, so you had to keep drinking water all day. Today the area is dry and harsh, but two million years ago it was green, and sitting by the lake trying to picture that never got old.

What surprised me most was how many fossils there are. Bone fragments lie scattered across the ground by the millions. The Kenyan members of the team could glance at a scrap on the surface and tell you what kind of animal it came from. That is how many important sites are found. One day we butchered a goat with stone tools we had made ourselves, so we could see what real cut marks look like on bone. It is one of the ways scientists tell whether early humans handled an animal, and I still think about it whenever I read about a "cut-marked" fossil.

archaeologyinfo.com

I met Scott Bjelland on that field school. He was there for the love of it, I was there for credits, and we hit it off. Back home we built archaeologyinfo.com together in 1999. Scott made the reconstructions of our ancestors that became the heart of the site. Over the next few years it grew to tens of thousands of visitors a month, and our images were reused in print and video productions.

We went to anthropology conferences on our own dime, just to meet the people doing the work. At one of them we met Louise Leakey, who invited us to Kenya to talk about building leakey.com. Scott and I stayed with Louise, flew with her in her small plane from Nairobi to Koobi Fora (terrifying for me, since I am very afraid of flying), and spent a week with her in the field. We visited Meave Leakey at the National Museums of Kenya, talked through some of the family's best-known discoveries, and held casts of the fossils in our hands. One afternoon we sat on the veranda at Richard and Meave Leakey's home in the Ngong Hills, looking out over some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen, and had lunch with Richard, Meave and Louise. It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Why Bonelore

Twenty-five years on, the science has moved a long way. Species have been named that we had never heard of in 1999, and dates have changed. Bonelore is a fresh start: new writing, an interactive world map of famous sites, and Scott's artwork back where people can see it. It begins with human evolution and will grow into archaeology more widely.

The artwork

The reconstructions on species pages are by Scott Bjelland, used with his permission. Please do not reuse them without asking.

How pages are written and checked

• Facts are checked against reliable sources, such as museum research programs and published scientific papers. Each page lists its main sources.
• Dates in human evolution change as new finds are made. I update pages when the science moves.

Corrections

If you spot a mistake, I would like to hear about it. Use the contact form.