Word: turkana
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...most exciting of the recent discoveries have come from East Africa and Richard Leakey, In 1972, Bernard Ngeneo, a Kenyan member of Leakey's fossil-hunting team, spotted a few scraps of bone exposed by erosion in sandy sediments in a steep gully near Lake Turkana's eastern shore. Working carefully, the Leakey team sifted scores of additional fragments out of the soil, then turned them over to Meave Leak ey, a paleontologist, and Anatomist Bernard Wood for assembly. As the last pieces of the six -week reconstruction job were put in place, the team mem bers found themselves staring...
...skull and a similar find, labeled 1590, proved that Homo habilis?from whom man could have descended?coexisted with Australopithecus, thus weakening arguments that the latter was man's direct ancestor. Then, in 1975, the Turkana site yielded a Homo erectus skull resembling that of Peking man and with a brain size of 900 cc. The age of the fossil, about 1.5 million years, showed that Homo erectus had emerged even earlier and was hunting in the African plains while Australopithecus still roamed the earth. Because the more advanced Homo erectus was almost certainly a direct ancestor of modern...
Perhaps no one is trying harder to fill in the blanks than Richard Leakey. Picking up where his father Louis left off at his death in 1972, Richard?with his Lake Turkana discoveries ?has already moved to the forefront of modern anthropology. Now he is reaching out to coordinate research throughout East Africa and taking the lead in sorting and assembling the thousands of fragments of evidence that may someday reveal the secrets of man's origins...
...research committee and listened patiently as his father outlined plans for the coming year. Then, when the committee members turned to him, he surprised them by outlining some plans of his own. He had spotted some intriguing sediment layers and stone tools during a brief reconnaissance at Lake Turkana and asked for funds to go back for a closer look. Taken by his brashness, the committee granted his request. But it came with a warning: "If you find nothing you are never to come begging at our door again...
Young Leakey's self-confidence was justified; the Turkana region has proved to be an anthropological mother lode. In a basin several kilometers deep, walls of strata lie exposed, many-layered sandwiches of volcanic ash and ancient sediments containing the remains of complete prehistoric environments. Organizing a team of fossil hunters, Leakey established a base camp at Koobi Fora, a mound at the inboard end of a long, crocodile-infested sand spit that curves out into the lake. Then he began following his nose?with remarkable success. Turkana has yielded the richest accumulation of remnants of man and his predecessors...