The primary objective of this research is use the evidence of buried soils to understand the habitat of one of the best known early fossil apes called Proconsul some 17 million years old from Rusinga Island, Kenya. Proconsul belonged to an archaic group of monkey-apes (proconsulids) widely considered ancestral to both the great apes and to early human ancestors (australiopithecines). The fossil apes are found along with other mammal fossils in soils buried within a sequence of river deposits. Some of the fossils are delicate skulls and articulated limbs that could not have been transported far from where the animals lived. Of the various kinds of soils buried within these stream deposits, Proconsul is consistently found in one kind of buried soil. The microscopic and chemical studies of this proposal are aimed at determining exactly what kinds of soils these were when they formed, and thus where in the mosaic of vegetation Proconsul lived.
