Word: turkana
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...poacher at work in the back country of contemporary Africa? No: this scene, or at least something like it, occurred some 1.5 million years ago, at the edge of Lake Turkana, formerly called Lake Rudolph, in northwestern Kenya...
Over the past decade, new discoveries of ancient human and pre-human fossils in Africa are forcing paleontologists and anthropologists to re-examine the history of the human species. Many of these important fossil discoveries have occured and are still occurring on the banks of Lake Turkana in Kenya, where a large team of workers at the Koobi Fora camp is making discoveries which trace human evolution back two and three million years. The head of the highly successful and productive Koobi Fora project is Richard E. Leakey, son of the world-famous prehistorians Louis and Mary Leakey. In light...
...accomplished Fossil Hunter, Richard Leakey wittily probes the remains uncovered near crocodile-infested Lake Turkana. The authors admit that we know little about Ramapithecus, a small apelike fellow who existed some 12 million years ago; all we have are a few teeth and bones. Nor, despite the recently unearthed ribs and vertebrae, is there much more data about Australopithecus, who survived until about a million years ago, then turned down an evolutionary dead-end street and disappeared. But science has learned what happened to habilis. With a brain-half again as big as his neighbors', he not only adapted...
...feud had ended in 1972 when the elder Leakey flew to Koobi Fora to spend an exciting evening with his son, examining fossils late into the night by the harsh light of a gas lantern. That night Louis predicted that Richard would find evidence of three hominid species at Turkana. A few weeks later, he died, unaware that events would prove him right. Says Richard: "I think his sheer dogged persistence?and his follow-through on ideas to the point where they were proved either right or wrong?was his greatest gift. In many ways, his greatest achievement...
Next summer, however, Leakey will lead a team to search south of Lake Turkana at a site called Suguta. The region is roadless, and he will have to go in, as in the old days, by donkey and camel. The discomforts may be worth it; a geological survey of the area shows fossil-bearing sediments between 5 million and 9 million years old, laid down in a period that has so far yielded few clues about the ascent...