Hello readers of the TBI Origins Field School blog, providing updates and a recap of this past week are students Maddie, an undergraduate at Stony Brook University, and David, a postgraduate student at Kenyatta University! After a relaxing Sunday at Ileret spent playing football alongside the locals at the nearby village, and some sodas [...]
This week’s blog comes from Simone and Sedona, and we’ll be talking about our experiences during the first week of the vertebrate paleontology course, which is also the field school’s first week while staying at TBI Ileret on the east side of Lake Turkana! Simone is a recent graduate from Boston University with a [...]
Hello, I am Tom Otube, an environmental science graduate from Kabarak University. This week we started our Human Evolution module which is taught by Dr. Carrie Mongle and Dr. Louise Leakey. On the first day, Dr. Mongle took us through the course objectives and an overview of human evolution by providing the historical context of [...]
Hello! My name is Patricia Nyaga, I just completed my undergraduate degree, Bachelor of Arts in History and Archaeology from Maseno University, expecting to graduate in December 2022. This being our second week studying Paleontology, our main focus was on the paleontological field methods. We headed to the Napudet hills for a two-day camping trip [...]
Hello! I’m Ian McMahon, a graduate student here at TBI. I graduated from SUNY Potsdam in 2020 with a degree in archaeology, specializing in human evolution and origins. This week, we started our paleontology module, taught by Dr. Ellen Miller, learning about the MIocene vertebrates of the Turkana Basin. The Miocene lasted from 23.03 to [...]
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 [...]
The twelfth annual Stony Brook Human Evolution Workshop was held at the Turkana Basin Institute’s (TBI) Turkwel research facility, between August 5-9th, 2014. The workshop was organized to mark the 50th Anniversary of the publication by Louis Leakey, Phillip Tobias and John Napier of the paper that established Homo habilis as a taxon (Leakey, L. S. [...]
The Pleistocene is sometimes called the Ice Age, but ice was as rare 2 million years ago as it is today in the Turkana Basin. Instead the glaciers in the north caused the deserts and arid grasslands to expand as the ice advanced and the expansion of the forests when the ice retreated. Our early [...]
As part of the TBI Field School students get to work on new fossil material. Well, maybe not “new” in the normal sense of that word, but they get to work with material that no one else has laid hands on or thought about because it just came out of the ground a few days [...]
Fossils usually aren’t very pretty when they come out of the ground. They’re usually caked in sediment or broken into tiny pieces that need to be reassembled. After they’ve been cleaned and put back together, the fossil is ready for interpretation, description, and display. Easier said than done. The process of getting a [...]
African mammals started out weird. When the dinosaurs bowed out sixty-five million years ago after a rough season with a few Indian volcanoes and a rough weekend with an asteroid near Cancun, Africa was already a continent adrift. Much like the modern island continent of Australia, home to unique mammalian lineages like kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, [...]
The Turkana Basin if famous for preserving the fossilized remains of our bipedal ancestors. But, there are more than fossil hominins in the rocks piled up around Lake Turkana. The remains of horses, pigs, fish, hyaenas, and hippos (lots of hippos) also tumble from the rock, providing the ecological and environmental context for the evolution [...]