#FACTSvsFALLACIES TURKANA - THE CRADLE OF MANKIND

FACT
Former Tukana district occupied the larger part of the north west of Kenya all within the Great East African Rift Valley bordering South Sudan and Ethiopia to the north and Uganda to the West
The area is semi-arid with extreme day temperatures and equally low temperatures at night.
 Dr Richard Leakey, a renowned Kenyan paleoanthropologist and conservationist, together with a group of paleotologists discovered  the famous "Turkana boy" the oldest and most complete skeleton of Homo erectus. 

Nariokotome Boy, or “Turkana Boy,” a Homo erectus found by Alan Walker and Richard Leakey, Lake Turkana, Kenya is the most complete Homo erectus ever found.

 The 9-12 year old boy believed to be around 1.6 million years old was an important milestone filling the gaps palaeotologists had found hard to fill back then. 
Watch a video of Dr Leakey and the Turkana boy here  

He and and his team made further discoveries. A new species of Australopithecus a bipedal species with an upright posture that dated over 4 million years ago, the earliest stages of human evolution. Human and animal remains were trapped and fossilized in the stratified sediments of the Great Rift Valley. Tectonic activity has uplifted many ancient sediments and the constant erosion of them by wind and water exposes new finds every year. The lake basin is rich in specimens of Australopithecus, the primitive “transitional” hominid with many ape-like features. Koobi Fora to the east of the lake has yielded some of the most fascinating animal fossils in the world. Different types of primitive elephants, prehistoric hippos, giraffes and ancient species of crocodiles are but a few of the fossils discovered around the lake shore.

 So Kenya and Turkana in specific has been scientifically proven to be the cradle of mankind!

further reading can be found here

#FACTSvsFALLACIES The Crying Stone of Ilesi - Kakamega

(FALLACY)
Ikhonga Murwe- the crying stone of llesi. Folklore and myth surround this rock found in the western region of the country in the county of Kakamega. Legend has it the rock can't stop 'crying'.

To the government it is a tourist attraction, to the Luhya community living around it, it holds both cultural and spiritual significance. the community carried out rituals to avoid droughts and for cleansing ceremonies. In modern society too the rock holds religious significance as churches like Legio Maria and Rosary Church make pilgrimages to it.


Geologically the rock is a large boulder of acidic plutonic rock, 8 meters tall, made up of quartz, alkali feldspars and mica. there is a small groove in the middle from which water flows out from. the water is believed to be from a moss growing inside the rock that soaks up water during the wet season which allows it to flow long periods of time. 

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DIAMONDS ARE NOT SQUISHED COAL!!

so what geological misconceptions have people had in the past and still have? well here is one

Reblogged from Lounge of the Lab Lemming

Diamonds are not former coal. Coal is the organic-rich remains of terrestrial plant matter, and this is younger than the oldest land plants, which are roughly 400 million years old. Pb isotope studies of diamonds show that they are generally between 2 and 2.8 billion years old, 5-7 times older than the oldest land plants. Thus diamonds were already collecting their pensions by the time the first coal beds were formed.

Secondly, they have different isotopic compositions. Plants, which fix CO₂ via photosynthesis, contain 2% less ¹³C than the Earth’s mantle, while most diamonds have mantle carbon isotopic composition. The light isotopic composition of coal is due to the preferential uptake of ¹²C over ¹³C during photosynthesis. Diamonds, not being related to coal, never photosynthesized, and do not show this effect.

Thirdly, metamorphic minerals have very different textures than hydrothermal ones. Diamonds are thought to precipitate from a CO₂ fluid when said fluid is reduced in the mantle. This allows big, low strain crystals to form. Solid state phase transitions generally involve lots of deformation and recrystallization. Were coal to be metamorphosed into diamond, it would probably form a diamond rock with micron-scale crystals. Impact diamonds have grainsizes that are micron to sub-micron, and the source of the carbon is difficult to determine. But they are tiny, and it is theoretically impossible for them to be more than a few carats (they need to be small enough to cool off before the shockwave dissipates, or they will revert to graphite).

Of course, it is theoretically possible to synthesize diamonds from coal in a lab. But this is unlikely to occur for several reasons. If the diamonds are being grown in a traditional metal catalyst belt apparatus, then a low sulphur carbon source should be used to prevent the nickel catalyst from being attacked. If coal was sulphur free, then trout in the Adirondacks would have nothing to complain about. In the case of Chemical Vapor Deposition diamond, a gaseous source- usually methane- is used. With either method, nitrogen from organic compounds in the coal would impart a yellow-green color in the diamond due to the absorption of the single N defect. So coal would be a poor source material for synthetic diamond production.

To summarize: Diamonds are too old to be squished coal, and even if they weren’t they contain the wrong sort of carbon and form through different processes. Furthermore, coal is a poor choice of precursor for synthetic diamond production, as spectroscopic graphite is best for metal catalyst diamonds, and methane is preferred for CVD.