Meave Leakey, Director of Field Research at TBI and research professor at Stony Brook University’s Department of Anthropology, received the 2016 Hubbard Medal, named for the first president of the National Geographic Society, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, often called National Geographic’s highest honor. The award is given for lifetime achievement in areas of research, discovery, and exploration. Meave Leakey in [...]
Skeletal remains of a group of foragers massacred around 10,000 years ago, on the shores of a lagoon in what is now southwestern Turkana, is unique evidence of a violent encounter between clashing groups of ancient hunter-gatherers, and suggests the “presence of warfare” in late Stone Age foraging societies. The fossilised bones of a group [...]
The Turkana Basin Institute, in collaboration with the University of Bradford, has set up a web site fossilfinder.org, recruiting an army of ‘citizen scientists’ to help discover fossils and other ancient artefacts using the unique online platform “Zooniverse”. fOssilfinder.org is a pioneering project, funded in part by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, enabling amateur [...]
The West Turkana Archaeological Project team has found the earliest known stone artifacts, dating to 3.3 million years ago. The discovery pushes back the beginning of the archaeological record by 700,000 years, or by over a quarter of humanity's previously-known material cultural history.
Discovered near the village of Ileret (shown on map) in northern Kenya, 3 new hominin individuals were announced on March 27. New hominin fossils from the Turkana Basin were announced on March 27 at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in St. Louis, MO. These fossils, representing 3 individuals of the genus [...]
Richard Leakey made headlines around the world in 1989 when a stockpile of 12 tons of ivory was burned in Nairobi National Park. This media event was orchestrated by Leakey, then Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, to raise awareness of the massive poaching problem from which Kenya was suffering at the time, and [...]
The twelfth annual Stony Brook Human Evolution Workshop was held at the Turkana Basin Institute’s (TBI) Turkwel research facility, between August 5-9th, 2014. The workshop was organized to mark the 50th Anniversary of the publication by Louis Leakey, Phillip Tobias and John Napier of the paper that established Homo habilis as a taxon (Leakey, L. S. [...]
The Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian and the fossil remains uncovered there continue to be a source of evolutionary fascination. The disappearance of these fossils en route from China to the American Museum of Natural History in 1941 has added to the mystery. While China’s contribution to our understanding of primate and human evolution has [...]