Word: turkana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...after A. ramidus made headlines, a team led by Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya (wife of well-known fossil hunter Richard Leakey) and Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University revealed that it too had found fossils of an ancient human ancestor at two sites near Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Not only is the new hominid very old, dating to 4.2 million years B.P., but it is similar in some ways to A. afarensis--though clearly more primitive. Given the family resemblance, Leakey and Walker assigned the fossils to the same genus, Australopithecus, and gave the new species...
...blustery, wintry afternoon in 1970 at the University of Chicago when I first met Louis and Mary's son Richard. He had just completed a preliminary presentation on his new finds from Lake Turkana (then Lake Rudolf). I told him I would be in Nairobi the next summer and wanted to see his exciting hominid fossils. A year younger than I, he had chosen, after becoming disenchanted with the safari business, to follow in his parents' footsteps. It appeared that he too possessed the "Leakey luck" and was well on the way to stardom in paleoanthropology...
...fossils from the earliest humans ever since 1871, when Charles Dar win first proposed that people and apes had a common ancestor. Kanapoi and Allia Bay, the sites where Leakey and Walker made their discoveries, lie about a day's drive north of Nairobi along the shores of Lake Turkana in the East African Rift Valley. An 1,800-mile-long gash in the surface of the earth, the Rift has yielded many important clues to early human history, because of its unique geology. Layers of sediment preserved animal specimens, while the volcanic eruptions that periodically shook the valley produced...
...discovery, which Leakey and Walker have named Australopithecus anamensis (anam is the Turkana word for lake), is yet another reason why paleontologists are reconsidering some of their ideas about why the earliest humans stood up. According to one theory, as a change in climate transformed Africa's moist forests into drier grasslands, evolution favored hom inids that could stand upright in order to spot predators lurking in the tall grasses. Other researchers argue that an upright posture lessened the heat the animals absorbed from the fierce tropical sun. Still others believe bipedalism freed the hands for carrying food or children...
Meanwhile, Louis's scientific and activist legacy is carried on by son Richard and daughter-in-law Meave. Among Rich ard's major finds are further evidence of Homo habilis and, with Alan Walker in 1984, "Turkana Boy," a 1.6 million-year-old skeleton of a strapping, adolescent Homo erectus. As director of the Kenya Wildlife Service from 1989 to 1994, Richard revitalized the country's national parks and deterred poachers, but he made political enemies in the process. As combative and tough as his father, he has survived a kidney transplant and the loss of both legs below...