KA Featured Report | Rosie Quint

Rosie Quint (2021 Human Sciences) writes:

In the summer of 2023, I travelled to Mozambique to participate in Oxford’s Paleo-Primate Field School in Gorongosa National Park. Led by Professor Susana Carvalho and colleagues at the Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution Lab, the project seeks to understand human evolution in the East African Rift Valley, using a unique combination of palaeontological and primatological research. I spent three weeks in the park, where our class of students from Oxford and Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique received lectures from the interdisciplinary research team on the project and participated in some of the project’s research, getting involved in baboon tracking expeditions and helping to monitor the decomposition of lion-hunted carcasses.

One highlight was spending a week wild camping at a Miocene fossil site where we participated in the project’s yearly dig, yielding lots of exciting findings, including a potential hominid tooth. Another exciting experience was seeing all the wonderful wildlife in the park. After much of the ecosystem was destroyed during the Mozambique civil war, it was amazing to see lions, elephants, crocodiles and hippos thriving in the park, thanks to a decades-long restoration project, as well as plenty of waterbuck and kudu. Learning from and alongside such a diverse group of people and learning to communicate across scientific disciplines as well as cultural and language barriers was an incredible once-in-a-lifetime experience.