The NSF Frontier Research in Earth Sciences program (FRES) has funded the Turkana Miocene Project proposal to the tune of ~$2.7 million. The grant will fund research over 4 years to better understand how climate change and tectonics interacted to shape the evolution of the environment in which the ancestors of humans and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangs emerged in Africa.
Smithsonian Magazine has named the "Decade’s Biggest Discoveries in Human Evolution." Fourth on the list is the discovery in 2011 of the world's oldest stone tools, made by a team of archeologists led by Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis of Stony Brook University: "When you think of technology today, you might picture computers, smartphones, and [...]
Photo credit: Miquel Torrents-Ticó. Local ecological knowledge, stemming from generations of human-wildlife interactions, is becoming an increasingly more significant source of important data for wildlife biologists. […]
It is known based on DNA analysis that chimpanzees are the closest living relatives to humans, the two together are closest to gorillas, then three together to orangs. Furthermore, humans, the great apes (chimpanzee, gorillas, and orangs) together with the lesser apes (gibbons and siamangs) belong to the superfamily named Hominoidea. The closest living [...]
Professor Ian McDougall, whose work was integral in the dating of Turkana Basin fossils, passed away on November 10, 2018.
A groundbreaking study has found the earliest and largest monumental cemetery in eastern Africa built 5,000 years ago by early pastoralists living around Lake Turkana, Kenya. This group is believed to have lived without major inequalities and hierarchies, contradicting long-standing narratives about the origins of early civilizations. The study, led by Elisabeth Hildebrand, PhD, Department [...]
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