Ancient DNA recovered from fossils is a valuable tool to study evolution and anthropology. Yet fossil DNA has not been found yet in any part of Africa, where it’s destroyed by extreme heat and humidity. In a potential first step at overcoming this hurdle, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and [...]
The discovery in Kenya of a remarkably complete fossil ape skull reveals what the common ancestor of all living apes and humans may have looked like. The find, announced in the scientific journal Nature on August 10th, belongs to an infant that lived about 13 million years ago. The research was done by an [...]
The discovery in Kenya of a remarkably complete fossil ape skull reveals what the common ancestor of all living apes and humans may have looked like. The find, announced in the scientific journal Nature on August 10th, belongs to an infant that lived about 13 million years ago. The research was done by an international [...]
Aerial image of TBI's Ileret facility. Image credit: Tanya Carr-Hartley.
When Richard Leakey invited Sarah, Duchess of York, to visit the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya their plan was to talk about humankind's place in the world. Sarah did not know that she would be visiting one of the places most affected by the devastating drought in northern Kenya just before World Water Day. [...]
Our Origins Field School students observe a pack of African wild dogs at Mpala Research Centre in the Laikipia region of central Kenya.
Stony Brook University professor John J. Shea recently published a new work through Cambridge University Press entitled Stone Tools in Human Evolution: Behavioral Differences among Technological Primates. From the publisher's description: In Stone Tools in Human Evolution, John J. Shea argues that over the last three million years hominins' technological strategies shifted from occasional tool use, [...]
The Turkana Basin Institute will host the thirteenth workshop of the Stony Brook/TBI Human Evolution Workshop series at its Turkwel campus from August 2 - 6. Entitled Rethinking Tool-making, the workshop is organized by archaeologists Drs. Sonia Harmand and Hélène Roche. The 2015 discovery of the earliest-known stone tools at Lomekwi 3 in West Turkana [...]