Paleoanthropology

Between 1967 and 1976, the International Omo Expedition, which initially included French, American and Kenyan contingents, explored the southern Ethiopian Turkana Basin deposits. Following Richard Leakey’s discovery of sedimentary rocks containing fossils on the East side of Lake Turkana, the Kenyan contingent withdrew in 1968 to prospect the Kenyan exposures on the northeastern shores of Lake Turkana. Thus began the Koobi Fora Research Project (KFRP), which has run the Kenyan Turkana Basin paleoanthropological research since that time. Much of the fossil evidence for human evolution between 7 and 1 million years has been unearthed in the Turkana Basin. The hominid fossil collection, which currently comprises more than 350 specimens, establishes Kenya as a key contributor to human evolution studies.

The Koobi Fora region has, over the last 35 years of exploration, produced a wealth of paleontological, geological and archaeological data. Research in the area has revealed a complex history of volcanism, tectonics and sedimentary cycles preserving fluvial and lake phases of the basin. Some 16,000 fossil specimens have been collected from the Turkana basin, almost 10,000 from the Koobi Fora Region. This has contributed significantly to our present understanding of human origins and hominid diversity through time. Hominid behavior, including tool use, has been interpreted from the archaeological remains. The huge collection of fossil mammals provides an opportunity to trace the evolution of numerous mammalian lineages back in time. A new team from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge, England led by Marta Lahr and Rob Foley has begun exploration of late Pleistocene sites on the west side of Lake Turkana with the goal to recover fossil evidence for humans for the last 200,000 years, the period during which anatomically modern people evolve and then spread throughout the World.