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 [...]
This Week, the students have been introduced to the story of being and becoming human. The scientific story of human evolution. Humans have always been curious to identify who they really are which poses questions like; how and why are we different from other mammals? What made us develop distinct traits like bipedality and bigger [...]
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. [...]
When scientists first set out to study human origins, the Victorian armchair theorists figured it was our big brains that set us apart from the animal kingdom. They expected the fossils of our earliest ancestors to have voluminous noggins but not be built for walking. This walking business would emerge after we realized how useful [...]
Human ancestors. This is why the Turkana Basin is on the paleontological map. Sure it preserves an intact record of the grassland ecosystem taking over East Africa and the immigration and local radiation of bizarre and wonderful plants and animals, but it’s the human story that draws us to Turkana. It’s not an inexplicable bias. [...]
As part of the TBI Field School students get to work on new fossil material. Well, maybe not “new” in the normal sense of that word, but they get to work with material that no one else has laid hands on or thought about because it just came out of the ground a few days [...]
Fossils usually aren’t very pretty when they come out of the ground. They’re usually caked in sediment or broken into tiny pieces that need to be reassembled. After they’ve been cleaned and put back together, the fossil is ready for interpretation, description, and display. Easier said than done. The process of getting a [...]
The Turkana Basin if famous for preserving the fossilized remains of our bipedal ancestors. But, there are more than fossil hominins in the rocks piled up around Lake Turkana. The remains of horses, pigs, fish, hyaenas, and hippos (lots of hippos) also tumble from the rock, providing the ecological and environmental context for the evolution [...]