Research Projects

Below are a few projects associated with the Turkana Basin Institute:

Island Africa Project

By the beginning of the Late Cretaceous time period, about 100 million years ago, Africa had become isolated from the other landmasses of the southern supercontinent Gondwana. The African and Arabian plates remained connected and drifted slowly to the northeast as an island continent, separated from all other landmasses, until about 25 million years ago, when a significant faunal connection with Eurasia was first established.  During its ~75 million years of Late Cretaceous and Paleogene isolation, Afro-Arabia witnessed a number of significant evolutionary events including the extinction of the dinosaurs and the origin and diversification of placental mammals.  Unfortunately, the vertebrate fossil record of Africa during this critical interval is very poorly understood, particularly between about ~95 and ~55 million years ago. The Island Africa Project is a consortium of American and African vertebrate paleontologists and geologists working together to fill this major gap in our understanding of African prehistory through collaborative paleontological and geological exploration.

Exploration and the recovery of fossils from the Late Cretaceous and early Paleogene of Africa will be critical for testing a number of outstanding hypotheses related to:

• The pattern and sequence of the breakup of the southern supercontinent Gondwana
• Dinosaur evolution in Africa prior to the K-T mass extinction
• The nature of mammalian evolution in the Late Cretaceous and early Paleogene of Africa

Koobi Fora Research Project

MISSION STATEMENT:

The continued research in the Turkana Basin will further the global understanding of human origins and the context in which it occurred through the recovery and investigation of new fossil material from deposits in northern Kenya.

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 includes an impressive 350 hominid specimens from the basin and this has contributed significantly to our present understanding of human origins and hominid diversity through time. Hominid behaviour, 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.

New sites are being discovered all the time, and the number of students and professionals in this field has greatly increased. Fossils continue to erode from the exposures and require collection to reveal more clues about the past. It is the mission of the KFRP to ensure that this vast potential is realized.

The Later Prehistory of West Turkana

 

The Later Prehistory of West Turkana (LPWT) team is a multidisciplinary group of researchers studying human behavioral change in West Turkana during the past 10,000 years. The team is exploring a wide range of interests, including intensive fishing-hunting-gathering, early herding, and the development of complex societies around Turkana.

Current LPWT members Elisabeth Hildebrand (archaeobotany), John Shea (stone tools), Veronica Waweru (geochronology), and Katherine Grillo (ceramics) did four weeks of fieldwork in July 2008, using the new TBI Turkwel campus as a base camp. Survey and excavation focused on the Losedok hills southwest of Kalokol, Ayangiyeng Inland Delta, and Lothagam, and sites overlooking Lake Turkana south of Kalokol.

Omo Kibish Project

The Omo Kibish paleoanthropological site was first discovered in 1967 during a joint exploration by the “International Paleoanthropological Research Expedition to the Omo Valley.” The mission comprised three teams from the United States, France and Kenya. The three teams worked in different localities, and the Kenyan group led by Richard Leakey was responsible for the discovery of the fossil bearing Omo Kibish deposits. After almost four decades of research hiatus, a new multidisciplinary team from the United States, Australia and Ethiopia has recently revisited the Kibish Formation and successfully refined the geology, chronology, paleontology and archaeology of the sites.