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The last course at the Turkana Basin Institute's Field School is Paleontology, the study of animal evolution through fossil remains, taught by Professors William Anyonge and Fredrick Kyalo Manthi.

Nearing the end of their Archaeology course, TBI students returned to the Aiyangiyang depression where, led by Veronica Waweru and Helene Roche, they conducted an excavation. Their efforts helped document some of the stone tools made by Holocene inhabitants of Turkana, and introduced them to techniques that many will use in their careers for years [...]

Sometime in the last few thousand years, a group of people who lived in the Turkana Basin erected a series of large stone pillars, also known as megalithic structures, underneath which they buried their dead. Though the people are gone, the structures remain remain behind them, and are a source of wonder to the Turkana [...]

The TBI Field School is situated in a broad and arid steppe, inhabited by Turkana pastoralists thought to have arrived in the last 300-400 years. The Turkana raise cattle, sheep, goats and camels, and are traditionally mobile, following rain and pasture with their herds. To differentiate the valuable herds or flocks of different families, the [...]

Having butchered two goats using stone tools the students produced themselves, TBI students and staff then held a roast last Saturday night, to celebrate and relax after a long week of work. Having butchered two goats using stone tools the students produced themselves, TBI students and staff then held a roast last Saturday night, to [...]

Stone tools first appear in the Archaeological record over 2 million years ago, and many believe that their production was perhaps the most important factor distinguishing our early ancestors from other animals. The Rift Valley, and Turkana Basin itself, are both home to the earliest sites of stone tool production: early stone tool creation is [...]

Raymonde Bonnefille brought TBI Field School students to the local town of Lodwar, at the start of her course on paleoecology, to show them its local meteorological station. Lodwar is the largest town in northern Kenya, and its meteorological station has collected data benefiting the local airport and climate scientists worldwide for over 50 years. [...]

French paleoecologist Raymonde Bonnefille led TBI Field School students to Kalodirr last Friday, with hopes of finding fossil wood among the rocks. Heading farther north than on previous expeditions, Raymonde and TBI students had to hike over difficult terrain, impassable by their lorry. West of NW Kenya's Lake Turkana, the region is among [...]

Close to completing their course on the modern ecology of the Turkana Basin, students hiked to an old growth tree grove adjacent to the Turkwel River. The grove, with a massive tamarind at its center supporting orchids and monkeys, is a local site of gatherings and ceremonies, and considered holy by some. Following their exam [...]

TBI's Ecology course kept Field School students busy from sunrise until sunset and beyond, as Dino Martins led students on birdwalks, collecting expeditions and late night hunts for scorpions. The landscape around TBI is filled with a fascinating array of East African birds, amphibians, and insects, all of whom took advantage of the [...]

Sweat is an abundant liquid around this neighborhood. TBI students and staff give out perhaps gallons of this stuff daily. On some Sundays we all go for a swim in lake Turkana at Eliye -a nice spot where a natural fresh water spring trickles into the saline jade sea. Last Sunday, after swimming in the [...]

Turkana Basin Institute students, faculty and staff were astonished on Wednesday when a vigorous windstorm gave way to rain. The whole ecosystem of the Turkana desert, from the smallest insects and algae to the fish, birds and great acacias depend upon annual rains. A drought has devastated the region for over 2 years now, and [...]

Dino Martins arrived at TBI over the weekend and, on Monday, began teaching a weeklong course on the ecology the the Turkana lake basin. Like much of East Africa, Turkana has been heavily affected by ecological disturbances caused by climate change and human land use patterns. To contribute to a scientific understanding of these changes, [...]

On Saturday, TBI students concluded their 2 week-long intensive course on human evolution by honoring the memory of Charles Darwin, exactly 202 years after his birth. The field of evolutionary biology has never advanced so quickly, nor been so integrated in modern and biomedical sciences as it is today. Nevertheless Darwin and his ideas remain [...]

Three decades ago a vacationing couple, while walking along the west shore of Lake Turkana, saw the back end of a human skull protruding from the sand. The cranium, or upper portion of the skull, was darkly stained and heavy from the process of fossilization, which over time had filled it with additional minerals. A [...]

TBI Field School Students began a study of fossil preparation on Tuesday, in an effort to better understand the process by which fossil remains are made ready for scientific analysis.We are accustomed to seeing pictures of beautifully preserved fossil crania on the covers of Science, Nature or National Geographic. Most fossils are not found intact [...]

I am wary of bloggers and blogging, and have not done it much in the past. But here I am, reluctant to admit that I finally feel that I have something interesting to share with the wider TBI community and maybe the world. So here’s my first blog post from TBI Turkwel. And to those [...]

During their day off on Sunday, TBI Field School students traveled south to Turkana's Nakwaparit elementary school for a friendly game of football (soccer in American English). The Turkana name Nakwaparit describes the "flat white field" outside the school, used by students for informal football matches. Though Nakwaparit students were younger than TBI students, both [...]

Moruorot is found in the badlands north of TBI basecamp, on the west shore of Kenya's Lake Turkana. Literally meaning "Orot's Hill" in the local Turkana language, the site of Moruorot is dominated by a great hill around which lie beds of exposed and fossil-rich sediments, wearing away for the last 18 million years. Instructor [...]

As part of their study of the evolution of apes in East Africa, field school students visited a series of geological sites on Wednesday that have yielded fossils critical to that evolutionary history. The Lothodok (or Losodok) range extends along the western border of Lake Turkana, appearing as a series of high ridges or low [...]