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TBI celebrates fifty years of Zinjanthropus with symposium in NYC

2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of Zinjanthropus in Olduvai Gorge by Mary Leakey, and The Turkana Basin Institute marked the event with a public symposium on September ...

TBI postdoc receives SVP award

STONY BROOK, NY--Frederick Kyalo Manthi, Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Scholar-in-Residence at the Turkana Basin Institute, recently received an award to attend and present a paper at the annual meeting of ...
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First-ever cast of 'Hobbit' unveiled at Stony Brook University

World-Renowned Anthropologist Richard Leakey Convenes Top Researchers To Discuss 'Flo,' The Enigmatic 'Hobbit'   Image: Skull of Homo floresiensis. STONY BROOK, N.Y., March 20, 2009 – A cast of a 'Hobbit' skeleton will be...

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About The Turkana Basin Institute
The vast landscape of the Turkana Basin. Photo credit: Lawrence Martin.
The vast landscape of the Turkana Basin. Photo credit: Lawrence Martin.

While the region surrounding Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya, is far from the major cities that dominate today’s global economy, it is central to the human story. The Turkana Basin holds the world’s richest record of human prehistory, and a fossil heritage that stretches back over 100 million years, into the age of the dinosaurs. Sediments brought into the lake basin buried our own ancestors, who made Turkana their home. More recent faulting and erosion have brought this evidence of human prehistory to the surface, where it awaits discovery.
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Featured News:

French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss dies

Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100.

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Fossil Find Sparks Debate on Primate Origins

Pieces of ancient primates can still pack a surprising punch. Consider a 37-million-year-old lower jaw that still sports many of its teeth and was found in Africa by paleontologist Erik Seiffert of Stony Brook University in New York and his colleagues. This newly unearthed creature had skeletal features that resembled those of higher primates, but it didn’t belong to the lineage that led to higher primates, Seiffert’s team reports in the Oct. 22 Nature.

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Chinese challenge to 'out of Africa' theory

The discovery of an early human fossil in southern China may challenge the commonly held idea that modern humans originated out of Africa.

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Ardipithecus material unveiled

ScienceNOW Daily News - Researchers have unveiled the oldest known skeleton of a putative human ancestor--and it is full of surprises.

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More Human Evolution:

Europe's First Farmers Were Immigrants: Replaced Their Stone Age Hunter-gatherer Forerunners

Mandala Hominid Footprints Puts Tanga On World Map

Hominid Footprints to Be 'Laid to Rest' in Kingly Manner

Man and maps go way back

"MISSING LINK" FOUND: New Fossil Links Humans, Lemurs?

'Hobbit' Skull Study Finds Hobbit Is Not Human

A Tiny Hominid With No Place on the Family Tree

More Prehistory:

Skull of pliosaur that 'could have bitten a car in half' found on Britain's Jurassic Coast

'Giraffe of the Mesozoic' Discovered

Seal bones found on shores of Lake Champlain

Duck-bill’s fossilized prints offer glimpse of New Mexico paleoenvironment

Dinosaurs are colorful, Yale researchers find

Beach fossil thought to be 20-million-year-old tortoise

Molecular Decay Of Enamel-specific Gene In Toothless Mammals Supports Theory Of Evolution