Yale Paleoarchaeology Lab

Mount Hora in Malawi. Home to some of Africa's oldest ancient DNA.

Miombo open woodland is a unique vegetation assemblage found across the southern central part of Africa. One of the many beautiful habitats of Malawi ❤️🇲🇼

Leaving site at the end of the day

Liwonde National Park, Malawi.

Ng'onga Hill, another beautiful site for future work. The rock shelters here are normally too smooth on the sides to offer roosting points for raptors, so they have few microfauna that can be used for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. But here at Ng'onga Hill there is a huge, deep archive of microfauna. The site itself also has walls covered well-preserved red paint. None of the rock art in the area is dated, so there may be some tricks we could use here to date that and even do some geochemical sourcing. Either way, it is a very important site.

We were so excited when we "discovered" it in 2017, only only to find that J. Desmond Clark had already reported it in the 1950s after coming to the area at the same time he first excavated at Hora 1. Ng'onga Hill is close to the modern town of Euthini and about an hour's drive north from the Hora area. That means any work here will require moving our logistical base. We are meeting with Inkosi Chindi this morning, a local leader and royal lineal descendant of the original Ngoni diaspora under Zwagendaba into Malawi in the 1800s. Inkosi Chindi is based at Euthini and also has authority over the Hora area.

Malawi Department of Museums and Monuments staff Mr. Joseph Tembo, Mr. Fredrick Mapemba, and Mr. Malani Chinula (left to right) at the just before the truck departed. Mr. Mapemba will be joining the driver and an assistant in the truck. See you on the other side!

It was 30 boxes in the end, a total of 3.5 tons of rock and dirt excavated carefully by hand over five years 😳. Loaded into 1.2 more tons of wooden boxes and lifted by four energetic guys in under an hour. They were a perfect fit on the truck without a single inch to spare 😯.

Team at did an incredible job of weighing and packing everything over the last two days, sacrificing their weekend to get the job done.

Here are two proud carpenters pretty darn happy this stage is done.

Euerka! A man named Patrick showed us some fossils that look younger than Pliocene. I wondered, is this the missing Middle Pleistocene of Karonga? Well, it seems likely 😁😁