In Kenya, rain is a blessing. It is something to celebrate if you have rain on your wedding day. If rain is a blessing, then nature wanted to shower the last few days at the Turkana Basin Institute with ...

The Pleistocene is sometimes called the Ice Age, but ice was as rare 2 million years ago as it is today in the Turkana Basin. Instead the glaciers in the north caused the deserts and arid grasslands to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

African mammals started out weird. When the dinosaurs bowed out sixty-five million years ago after a rough season with a few Indian volcanoes and a rough weekend with an asteroid near Cancun, Africa was ...

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, ...

It’s the little things that will make you worry when you sign up for something like the Turkana Basin Field School. Most of this blog has documented the stuff that might be expected. You sign up for ...

A barren, rolling landscape and a ring of stones. Evidence of mysterious ritual feasts and astrological signs. The true purpose of the site long forgotten. It’s an image that conjures up ancient Celtic ...