Preparators from the National Museums of Kenya at the Ileret research facility of the Turkana Basin Institute, starting manual preparation and supplementing the field consolidation (chemical hardening) of Loxodonta adaurora cranium KNM-ER 63642. From left to right: Cliff Onyango, Robert Moru and Christopher Kiarie. Image credit: Steve Jabo, Smithsonian Institution A remarkably well-preserved [...]
The students together with their facilitators from Ileret's hydroponics training As part of the Water Energy for Food Programme Funded Project in Ileret, we have been conducting training in Hydroponic Farming for local community members. In June this year, we conducted public participation meetings to let people know about the opportunity and [...]
This summer, the Turkana Basin Institute in association with Stony Brook University’s Department of Geosciences inaugurated the new Luminescence Dating Research Laboratory. Currently the only one of its kind on the U.S. East Coast, the establishment of this new facility was led by Assistant Professor Marine Frouin, a specialist in geochronology and luminescence dating, who joined [...]
The Turkana Basin Institute has joined the project Consolidating the Future through Mastering the Deep Past (CONFMAP), led by archaeologist Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University and TBI. The project is funded by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, and aims to improve access to paleosciences for marginalized populations while raising awareness in Kenyan of the value of the prehistoric archaeological heritage of Turkana County in northern Kenya.
TBI has been organizing a number of football tournaments in Ileret to keep the youth engaged and active during this long school hiatus due to COVID-19. With schools closed indefinitely, students were sent back to their villages with little opportunity for engagement and activity, leaving them vulnerable to early marriages, teenage pregnancies, and drug [...]
A new project will expand TBI's hydroponic gardening technology throughout the arid Turkana Basin region, bringing fresh produce to local communities.
The NSF Frontier Research in Earth Sciences program (FRES) has funded the Turkana Miocene Project proposal to the tune of ~$2.7 million. The grant will fund research over 4 years to better understand how climate change and tectonics interacted to shape the evolution of the environment in which the ancestors of humans and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangs emerged in Africa.
Smithsonian Magazine has named the "Decade’s Biggest Discoveries in Human Evolution." Fourth on the list is the discovery in 2011 of the world's oldest stone tools, made by a team of archeologists led by Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis of Stony Brook University: "When you think of technology today, you might picture computers, smartphones, and [...]