Paivaa/hello! Welcome to another installment of TBI’s field school blog! This weeks blog post is written by me, Onni Purhonen. I’m a biology student from the University of Helsinki in Finland, currently in my second year of studies and specializing in ecology and evolutionary biology. The current field school-module on ecology with Dr. Dino J. [...]
Personal journal excerpt: It is Tuesday evening; I am relaxing in Mpala research center reminiscing a productive day. I am inspired to write a short account of the ant-acacia relationship we learned earlier today: Picture an ant, One ferocious and alert, She tends and serves, To protect her reserves! Picture another ant, One [...]
Hello! We are the DART - OPTiK team, a collaboration of researchers from the University of Edinburgh, STFC UKRI, Technical University of Kenya and the Turkana Basin Institute. We will be working at the TBI base in Ileret for the next couple of months to set up a portable telescope which will then take observations [...]
This July, Kevin Hatala (Chatham University), Neil Roach (Harvard University) and Louise Leakey (Stony Brook University) led a TBI team unearthing a new early Pleistocene footprint site at Koobi Fora. The first tracks were discovered last year by Louise’s team at the bottom of an important skeletal fossil excavation. This year’s excavation uncovered a large [...]
On the Eastern side of Lake Turkana, the sediments reveal information about the early evolution of humankind. The sedimentary sequences tell us what it would have been like for early humans such as Paranthropus boisei, Homo erectus, and early Homo species millions of years ago. However, in stark contrast to the ecosystem that was home [...]
Hi again! It’s Ava and Christine, Mechnical Engineering Undergraduate students from MIT D-Lab. After a beautiful few days spotting animals in the Masai Mara, we flew up to TBI's facility on the east side of Lake Turkana in Ileret to continue our evaporative cooling research! During our time in Ileret, we focused on understanding the [...]
Pan of the Miocene Dead Elephant Valley in Buluk, Kenya The last stop on the Turkana Miocene Project field tour was Buluk, Kenya, which has for many years been headed by Ellen Miller. Located east of Lake Turkana, Buluk is an early Miocene site that is rife with…. everything! It is a [...]
We are very sad to share with you the news that Kamoya Kimeu passed away earlier this week after a short spell in hospital with kidney complications. We send our deepest condolences and thoughts to all of his family. Our subsequent appeal to friends and well-wishers to help the family with medical and funeral expenses, [...]
Molecular studies in the late 1960s demonstrated that humans are closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas, and that all three of these great ape lineages shared a relatively recent origin on the African continent. Continued study and methodological advances since this time have revealed that humans and chimpanzees are each other’s closest living relatives and [...]
In December 2021, the West Turkana Archaeological Project (WTAP) in partnership with the Turkana Basin Institute, the National Museums of Kenya, and with support from the French government opened an exhibition in Nairobi to showcase the earliest stone tools in the world, found in Lomekwi, Turkana County in 2013. In June 2022 the exhibition moved [...]
This past weekend we visited the West Turkana Archaeological Project(WTAP) campsite at Lomekwi and had the opportunity to set up and test a charcoal evaporative cooler and a hanging evaporative cooler. The field research camps have limited access to electricity and cold storage for fruits and vegetables, so evaporative cooling is a potential solution to [...]
Mountains south of Lokichar. These rocks form the core of a Neoproterozoic island arc. Turkana and the East African Rift. The ‘cradle of humanity’. But what is this cradle actually made of? And why is The Rift where it is anyway? The Rift is such an important feature for nurturing primates and [...]
Hello! We are Ava and Christine, from MIT D-Lab, and this summer we are working with the Turkana Basin Institute and our PI, Dr. Eric Verploegen, to research evaporative cooling as a means of post harvest fruit and vegetable storage. In regions of the world where access to food preservation methods is limited, up [...]
We recently feted three candidates from TBI’s Ileret scholarship program that sponsored students from the Daasanach community. They are Rahma Ahmed Said, Joseph Arcoy Hirbnle and James Loki Abucha. Their faces are presently unmistakable in the village, having produced exceptional performance in KCSE 2021. Such results have not been seen at the remote location [...]
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Dino J. Martins has accepted an offer from the Board of TBI (Kenya) Ltd. to serve as Chief Executive Officer of TBI (Kenya). The offer was made following full consultation with, and enthusiastic support from, TBI Kenya’s key partners: Stony Brook University, the Stony Brook Foundation, and [...]
Wednesday 20th April was yet another memorable occasion for the Ileret community and the community outreach program as TBI hosted the annual scholarship meeting. This was the first such meeting of its kind in Ileret after the Covid-19 restrictions were eased. The attendees of the scholarship review meeting at TBI Ileret The meeting [...]
TBI has been honored to host Dr. Deborah Lindell of Case Western Reserve University for the last 8 months during her Fulbright Fellowship in Turkana. Dr. Lindell has been working on developing a Nursing BSN program at the Turkana University College (TUC), as well as teaching TUC students, conducting research into nursing in Turkana county [...]
Paleontologist and National Geographic Explorer Isaiah Nengo, associate Director of the Turkana Basin Institute and Director for Research and Science at the Turkana Basin Institute passed away on 23 January at the age of 60. He was passionately dedicated to the study of Miocene hominids in Turkana, Kenya and his fieldwork led to the [...]
World-renowned paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard E. Leakey, chair of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) and a professor in the Stony Brook University Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences died January 2 at the age of 77. Leakey devoted the majority of his life to research on human origins, conservation of [...]
On Sunday 2nd January, we lost a true warrior, an individual so large in presence that he left a void that can never be filled. He has been described as iconic, and a force of nature, but to us he was Richard, Dad, and Babu. As a family, we are enormously grateful for the [...]