Video: Exploring Human Origins at Kenya’s Lake Turkana
2025 Hallam L. Movius, Jr. Lecture by Louise Leakey, Director, Koobi Fora Research Project; Research Professor, Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University; National Geographic Explorer at Large Kenya’s fossil-rich Turkana Basin has been—for over five decades—a cornerstone in unraveling the story of human origins in Africa. In this lecture, renowned paleoanthropologist Louise Leakey will delve into the groundbreaking discoveries at Lake Turkana, including hominins and fossil fauna that have reshaped our understanding of human ancestry. She will discuss the challenges of early exploration, and the impact of the Koobi Fora research camp, the National Museums of Kenya, and the Turkana Basin Institute, in advancing paleoscience. In closing, she will address opportunities to enhance research, collections care, and capacity-building at Lake Turkana through innovative funding, collaborations, and citizen science projects. Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, and the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
Recorded April 17, 2025
Transcript
Exploring Human Origins at Kenya’s Lake Turkana
[00:00:06.68] Good evening, everyone. Welcome My name is Jane Pickering, and I'm the William and Muriel Seabury House Director of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology here at Harvard. And I'm delighted to welcome you all, and of course, our Zoom audience, as well. So welcome to everyone, both online and in person.
[00:00:29.76] And I'm delighted to welcome you to a really special evening, which is our annual Hallam L. Movius, Jr lecture presented by the Peabody and also Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. And I would like on behalf of us all, actually, to extend our heartfelt thanks to the Movius family, who are sitting over there, for their support in making this lecture series possible. So if you could join me in a round of applause.
[00:00:58.85] [APPLAUSE]
[00:01:03.43] Thank you. And we're deeply honored thanks to you guys to welcome tonight's distinguished speaker, paleoanthropologist Louise Leakey. And she will be sharing insights into the pivotal role of Kenya's Turkana Basin and the remarkable fossils discovered there by her and others in shaping and expanding our understanding of human evolution in Africa-- human origins, I should say. That's what I said.
[00:01:33.52] And so I just do this practical thing is to say that after the lecture for our in-person audience, we will be hosting a reception upstairs in our third floor galleries. So I hope you can all stay and join us for that to talk about the lecture, catch our speaker. And there will be some volunteers in the door over in that direction who can direct you upstairs into the museum galleries.
[00:01:59.86] I also want to let you know that to find out about upcoming Peabody Museum events and events at our other museums, I invite you to visit our website. And you can see the details and you can also sign up for our e-news, and then you'll get privileged experience, early experience, knowing what's happening.
[00:02:21.73] But it is now my pleasure to introduce my distinguished colleague, Daniel Lieberman, Edwin M. Lerner Professor of Biological Sciences and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and he is going to introduce our speaker. Thank you.
[00:02:42.39] So it's a sincere pleasure to introduce Louise Leakey for tonight's annual Movius Lecture. And this prestigious lecture series, and for which we're really grateful to the Movius family for endowing, is named in honor of Hallam Movius, Jr, who was a towering figure in Paleolithic archeology. Professor Movius-- you have to call him Professor. Movius-- was educated at Harvard, served in World War II as an intelligence officer, and then joined the Harvard faculty in 1948, where he quickly rose up the ranks to become a professor, and he retired in 1978.
[00:03:16.31] Professor Movius made many fundamental contributions to the study of human prehistory, but he's probably best known for two achievements. The first is that he traveled just about everywhere in the old world, surveying and amassing what was then the most comprehensive collection of Paleolithic artifacts ever studied. And this gave him a unique global perspective on human evolution, including that led to the famous hypothesis of the Movius Line. If you know what the Movius Line is, you can ask me at the wine and cheese reception afterwards.
[00:03:48.14] But perhaps more importantly, he excavated many sites on many continents, but the most important of which was the famous upper Paleolithic site of Abri Pataud in France, and this groundbreaking excavation played a key role in transforming paleoanthropology into the multidisciplinary enterprise that it is today by combining archeological analyzes of artifacts with geology, botany, zooarchaeology, and other fields. It was really a groundbreaking excavation.
[00:04:16.99] And that brings me to tonight's speaker, Louise Leakey, because Louise embodies the kind of interdisciplinary paleoanthropology that Hallam Movius helped create. And I was fortunate to first meet Louise when I was a graduate student in the late 1980s, and I've been fortunate to know her, get to know her better over the last few years, both in Nairobi and in Lake Turkana, about which she will talk.
[00:04:39.34] And it's no secret that Louise represents the third generation of paleoanthropologists in her storied family. And I believe you're going to hear from Louise a little bit about what it's like to be the grandchild of Louis and Mary Leakey, and the daughter of Richard and Meave Leakey. But Louise has distinguished herself on her own. She did her undergraduate degree in geology and biology at the University of Bristol, and then did a PhD at the University College of London, and she's been-- ever since she was probably six years old or so, she's been excavating in Kenya and running the Koobi Fora research project. Well, she wasn't running the Koobi Fora research project when she was six years old, but after she got her PhD. And you're going to hear a lot about that, of course.
[00:05:18.31] She's also a professor at Stony Brook University. And she has authored and co-authored numerous papers in prestigious journals like Nature on key findings, including the oldest stone tools, the origins of the genus Homo, species diversity in the genus Australopithecus, the paleoecological context of human evolution, and other sundry topics, including the diet of striped hyenas. She has also worked tirelessly to engage with and support local communities in the North of Kenya.
[00:05:47.68] I think it's fair to say that Louise embodies the kind of multidisciplinary approach to paleoanthropology that Hallam Movius helped forge, and we are thus fortunate that she agreed to fly all the way from Kenya to speak to us tonight, especially in these troubling times when it helps to remember why we're here at Harvard, to teach, to do research, and in the words of our president, Alan Garber, engage in, quote, "fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth, which is a journey without end." So thank you, Louise.
[00:06:14.02] All right. Thank you very much for that introduction, Dan, and your persistence in trying to get me over here. And I finally said, the only way to stop these emails coming is to actually come. And so here I am. But I'm very honored to stand here before you. Thank you to the Movius family for endowing the lecture and for the invitation, and Jane for hosting me at the museum and for everybody for coming to listen to this talk, in person and online.
[00:06:44.47] It is a very important time in the world to realize that we do have a common past and we have a common future. If there's one thing I could wish for is that everybody would stop to contemplate that in this world.
[00:06:59.37] There's something else I would like to wish for. It would be for my grandfather, Louis, to come back and pop his head into the world today, not to see the politics per se, but to see all the incredible fossils that have been found since he left us in 1972, and also to see how many people he inspired in this extraordinary field of paleoanthropology. And there have been so many contributions by people all over the world to help us tell this extraordinary story.
[00:07:31.37] So as you can possibly imagine, my upbringing wasn't normal, and I had no appreciation of this fact until much later in time. But our summer holidays, we were dragged up to Lake Turkana, which is in the very North of Kenya, where we scrambled up hillsides. We helped participate in some of the screening and we stuck fossils together as our jigsaw puzzles. And it really set me up very well in terms of how to run fieldwork and how to be part of a team that are working in these very, very remote parts of Kenya, in the very North of the country.
[00:08:11.02] And so part of what I decided to do as a youngster was to learn to fly. It seemed like as good a tool to me as learning to drive a car, because of the distances that one has to travel to go up to the North, which at that time was a four day drive in a vehicle or a four hour flight in this little aeroplane that I learned to fly in.
[00:08:36.53] I'm here standing on the wings, refueling this airplane. Unfortunately, one day I had a Spanish journalist with me who decided he would be helpful. And in fact, as he passed up a Jerry can to me, he put his hand on the windscreen and it cracked the entire way across it. Well, I'm miles away from Nairobi and I had only one thing I could do, and that was to get a little can of hot coals and some insulating wire, heat it up, and then poke little holes either side of the crack and put in 100 different stitches and twist these little stitches up so that I could fly myself and my mother back to Nairobi again.
[00:09:19.96] So many flying stories that we could share, but I'm not going to do that tonight. We're going to get on to other topics. But needless to say that my mother, Meave Leakey, was very much a part of my life at Lake Turkana, a great adventurous spirit, a wonderful mentor, and she and I have many fond memories working together at Lake Turkana. She's probably got more flying hours than most people, although she never got her flying license because she said if she did that, she would never be in the field doing the work. She'd always be transporting people up and down, which is what I spent a lot of time doing.
[00:09:57.53] Maeve today is retired. She sits on the edge of the Rift Valley. She is very excited about all the things that are happening at Lake Turkana, and at any opportunity I have, I take her North to see and join in with some of the work that is continuing there today.
[00:10:17.66] My father, of course, was also a great inspiration. He had two kidney transplants in his life. The first one, in 1979, my mother gave him a kidney. In 2006, he lost his limbs in a plane crash when he was flying himself, and he went on to have a liver transplant, say, eight years before he died in 2022. He was an extraordinary fighter and we could never complain in our household because you were told to toughen up, for obvious reasons.
[00:10:51.89] But he was an inspiration to many, had many different careers in his lifetime, as well, and he was also a person who liked to think big, to imagine the impossible and to build. He loved to build. And I'm going to talk about some of his building projects, but he wouldn't have been where he was today without the steadfast support of Meave, who was always by his side.
[00:11:22.70] And I would highly recommend reading her book, The Sediments of Time, which really tells the story through her eyes. And it's a great read, written with my younger sister Samira, as well. So I just wanted to give you that information because sadly, this book came out just as COVID came out and she was unable to get out in the world and talk about it herself.
[00:11:46.87] As I said, my father liked to build, and one of the things he felt very strongly about was that Kenya needed facilities to house these collections. They were finding so many fossils in the North of Kenya that it meant that we really needed facilities to store these collections. He didn't like to see fossils leaving Kenya. And so in order to keep those collections in his home country, he decided he would raise the money to put together the buildings that today house the fossils, the paleontology collections, and the archeological collections and the hominids, as well.
[00:12:30.40] So this building was completed in 1977 with lots of different donors there, and today it's really quite full. They've run out of space. Collections are in a state of urgent need for rehousing, if you like. And this is something that I feel very strongly that we again need to focus on how we can safeguard these collections for future generations, as well. So we did a piece in the New York Times recently. It was on the front page, which actually illustrated the plight of Kenya's collections and the need to try and raise awareness and support for them.
[00:13:12.69] But having established the museum in Nairobi, his next move was to try and actually establish facilities in the North of Kenya, because he then felt if you want to make sure that these areas are safeguarded for future generations, you can't be taking fossils out of the North of the country and back to Nairobi. You've actually got to put infrastructure that means that these fossils are then translated into jobs for people from those local communities, that you're training communities and people from those areas to be the fossil hunters and the preparators and the scientists, and to be leading the expeditions with scientists coming in from all over the world.
[00:13:55.26] And so he then decided to find the site to put down the foundations for this next project, which was the Turkana Basin Institute. So he flew in this little helicopter with a surveyor and Omari Bwana, who was very instrumental in the museum days, and decided that he had seen a site that had a beautiful view, and this was where he should build this facility. It overlooks these 3.5 million year old deposits, overlooks the Turkwel River, and where he's standing in this picture is where the main mess of the Turkana Basin Institute was built.
[00:14:38.72] He loved to draw his plans. He never had architects. And he actually drew these sketches on these bits of square paper with a Biro pen. And Kimondiu, Joseph Kimondiu, who's in this photograph, was the builder, the foreman, who did all the building and established the infrastructure.
[00:14:57.59] So a few years later-- this was in 2008 or 2009-- the buildings had begun to emerge. And this is the facility on the West side of Lake Turkana. There's another facility on the East side, as well, and this is what it looks like today.
[00:15:15.10] This is actually a major achievement because Turkana is a long way away. And so to be able to launch your expeditions as a student or to actually come in here and have your fossils cleaned because you need to study them and to leave your fossils on site so you can come back and actually look at them the following year, it's very, very difficult to imagine would have been possible. But this establishment, the Turkana Basin Institute, is the field station on the West side, and there's another one on the East side, which today house collections that you can see here. Let me make that work. There you are.
[00:16:03.28] House collections, such as this very large elephant that's been wheeled in here by the staff. There are other elephants on the floor, and crocodiles, wonderful collections that are part of the collections of Kenya. These all are accessioned as part of the National Museums of Kenya collections. But they're housed in the North of the country, and they've translated into work for the people from the North.
[00:16:30.05] This, of course, is a wonderful opportunity for field schools to take place. Students come in and use those facilities for their own research projects, and it's really set the stage for a lot of work to be done in the North of Kenya and up the pace of discovery, because it is so much easier now to use this infrastructure to launch your own expeditions.
[00:16:57.47] So this all really began, this story, with my grandfather Louis and grandmother Mary. And Louis met Mary Leakey when he was at Cambridge, and she was asked to illustrate one of his books of stone tools, one of his publications. She was a great artist and had a tremendous adventurous spirit, and he and her came out to Kenya in 1935. And they head off, they went off down to Olduvai Gorge, which you see in this image here, which is a wonderful little site, tiny by comparison to Lake Turkana.
[00:17:37.70] But preserved in those sediments are two million years of time. The very bottom of the sequence, there are these black volcanics that were laid down about the same time as the Ngorongoro highlands were last active. And then above that you've got lake and fluvial sediments, these white deposits that contain many of the fossils that were found at Olduvai, and this distinctive red bed that goes from about 1.2 million years to 800,000 years or thereabout.
[00:18:06.95] But the fossils are tumbling out of these hillsides. And at the time that Louis and Mary started to explore Olduvai, the conventional thinking was that if you wanted to look for evidence of human origins, you would not look in Africa. You would be looking outside of the African continent. So it was incredibly difficult for him to get the financial support to do the fieldwork.
[00:18:31.74] But one afternoon in 1959, my grandmother was walking down into the gorge, and she wandered down over this rocky hillside and spotted these very shiny black teeth, which she identified as belonging to a hominin. And they began to excavate away the sediment from this upturned palate that you see in the picture there and exposing these very large teeth.
[00:19:02.10] And a huge hole then was dug into the hillside, and that is the excavation as you see it there, but they only recovered the skull. But it's a very unusual looking skull. But it was this find that put Africa on the map and made it possible for Louis and Mary to actually get financial support for their field work, because up until that point they really struggled, which is why this fossil was named zinjanthropus boisei in recognition of the man Charles Boise, who had funded their initial work at Olduvai.
[00:19:39.72] It has this very distinctive sagittal crest, which served as a muscle attachment for this large chewing muscle because it had such large teeth, a relatively small brain. But Louis felt that at that time, perhaps, this was the upright walking ancestor that might have been making the stone tools that they were finding littered across those hillsides at Olduvai. Subsequently, they found different species, and we'll talk more about that in due course. But that find, at 1.75 million years, was much older than fossils that they'd been finding outside of Africa, and so Louis was then able to get the support that enabled them to get back into the field on a more regular basis.
[00:20:29.48] So the bit of the story that we're interested in, or that Louis and Mary were interested in, was, of course, what happens after the time that we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees. What is the story between 6 million years and the present day? We know very little about the evolutionary story between the common ancestor with chimps and humans that lead to the line of pan, of chimpanzees. What we've been focused on in part of our work is this story on the upright walking ancestral line, the hominins, if you like.
[00:21:10.08] And so if Louis could see what has happened since, I think he would be tremendously impressed because this story has been told from many different sites in Africa, but in particularly in East Africa, as well. And when he was working at Olduvai, they really just had found this species, Paranthropus boisei. And they knew of a few things outside of Africa, as well. So I think this is testament to what he set in motion so many years ago.
[00:21:44.08] The other thing that Louis felt very strongly about, because fossils obviously don't preserve behavior, is to actually see what modern great apes were doing. And so he decided to enlist the support or to get these young women involved in looking at behavior of the great apes. And so this is Jane Goodall, who is looking at chimpanzees from Gombe in Tanzania. And she observed that chimpanzees use tools, which changed the definition of what made us human because humans, the tool maker, clearly weren't the only species that were making and using tools.
[00:22:36.21] He also involved Dian Fossey and also Birute Galdikas, looking at the orangutans and mountain gorillas. And in fact, my mother, Meave, came out to East Africa to work for Louis originally to look at some of the modern primates.
[00:22:55.08] But today, we know of the earliest stone tools from a site on the West side of Lake Turkana, found by a French team led by Sonia Aumont, where they found stone tools at 3.3 million years. And that would have been a huge surprise to Louis and Mary had they seen that discovery.
[00:23:16.61] So why on Earth do we have fossil sites on the Eastern part of the African continent? And of course, we know very little about what's going on further West, because it's all under forest. But the reason we have the fossil sites on the Eastern part of the continent is because of the Rift Valley, which goes from Jordan all the way down through to Lake Malawi. And you have the Western branch with these very deep lakes, like Tanganyika. And then you've got lakes that run all the way up and down the length of the Eastern branch of the Rift Valley.
[00:23:52.05] And these lakes accumulate sediment, which as water flows out of the highlands either side, is deposited bearing the bones of animals that are living and dying in and around these lake basins. The Rift Valley is also very active in terms of volcanic activity, so you've got this exceptional record of dates, because you can use the glass crystals in the ashes to get radiometric dates, as well as these distinctive chemical signatures that allow you to identify different ashes from different eruptions. So you've got a really good geochronological sequence throughout the rift that allows you to work out where you are in time.
[00:24:37.55] Southern Africa has a whole different depositional environment. There, you've got cave deposits. And often, if you step into these caves, I like to tease Lee Berger for the fact that he puts his head into a cave and he'll find another skeleton. He literally is finding skeletons at a tremendous rate, which are often quite different to things that we've seen in East Africa.
[00:25:00.53] But we don't have the fortunate situation where we find these complete skeletons because as an animal dies on the edge of a shoreline or a fluvial floodplain, vultures and scavengers come in and disperse the remains. And so what's preserved are just fragments of the original animal. It's very, very rare to find complete skeletons. But needless to say, you see the fossil sites essentially following the length of the Rift Valley.
[00:25:31.89] One of these impressive lake basins is, of course, the Turkana Basin. And it is this long lake in the desert of the North of Kenya, which either side of this lake, which is about 160 miles in length, you have fossil exposures that go back to the late Cretaceous on the very Northwest of the lake basin here, and those contain some dinosaur remains. We've got Oligocene sites at about 30 million years. You've got Miocene deposits that go back to 17, 16 million years. And then you've got a range of Pliocene and Pleistocene sites, as well, all the way through to the last 4,000 years. So it's an extraordinary lake basin in terms of where you can study specific time periods.
[00:26:28.19] It is very large an area to explore, and it is very remote, as I said, to get there. It takes a lot of logistics to mount your expeditions for the work.
[00:26:41.31] It's fed by the Omo River, which drains the Ethiopian highlands, and today there is no outlet to this lake basin. And the Omo River comes out of the Ethiopian highlands. And over the past four, five milllion years, it's meandered its way down through this basin and used to have an outlet to the Indian Ocean. And when it was incredibly full at the high stands of the lake, it would flow North and in fact join up with the Nile system, as well. So it's a very exceptional sight when you want to look at this work.
[00:27:20.36] Now, my father was asked to explore the Omo Valley as part of a joint expedition with an American team led by Clark Howell and a French team led by Yves Coppens, and they set off to the Omo Valley, where there are, again, extensions of the deposits that we now know exist at Lake Turkana. And you can see in the very little corner here, there is a small camp on the top of those deposits.
[00:27:53.79] The problem with the Omo River is that it's a fast flowing river, and it contains a lot of very large crocodiles. And they decided to give the young 22-year-old, my father, the sites on the other side of the river to work, because somehow he was going to have to step up to the challenge of how to cross all of his equipment to get the work done on the other side.
[00:28:20.24] So they devised a raft. They made it with inner tubes, I think, and bits of wood, and they set off to transport their vehicles across this river. They got chased on several occasions by these large crocodiles, and soon they decided not to use that little boat to get up and down the river, because it got too exciting to be worth their while.
[00:28:48.19] But they did find some very impressive fossils. They found a couple of skulls, and Louis made it to the Omo Valley to pay them a visit. And although he wasn't particularly impressed about the age of them at that time, today, they represent some of the oldest fossils that we know of modern humans, of Homo sapiens.
[00:29:13.05] And it was on his way back up to the Omo Valley that he was flying in a small aeroplane, and a storm blew up on the Western side of Lake Turkana and pushed him across to the Eastern shoreline, where he looked down and saw fossil deposits. And he was then able to get into this funny looking helicopter, which looks a bit like a dragonfly, and fly South and land in Kenya on the Eastern side of the lake there. And when they jumped out of this helicopter, to the surprise of the Dassanech elders there who had never seen such a machine-- and in fact, I was told by Bob Campbell, who took this photograph, that they were laughing at the reflection of themselves in the windscreen of this helicopter.
[00:30:00.54] But when they jumped out of the helicopter, they found stone tools and fossils. And my father then thought, well, why would I be working across this river on the wrong side of the river with crocodiles in it? I could explore my own patch of fossil sites in the North of Kenya. So that launched what became the then Koobi Fora research project and the first exploration explorations of the Eastern shores of Lake Turkana in 1968.
[00:30:31.80] Now, in those days, they had no idea where they were working, and the only record we have of things that they found, this handful of hominin fossils there that you see in the bottom left corner, were these scribbles in these diaries, which show hills and roads. And Allia Bay is a little bay in the lakeshore. So we don't actually know where those things came from today. Fortunately, they stopped collecting and then worked out how to record things better.
[00:31:06.55] So the following year, they went back and they set up their camp on the shoreline of Allia Bay, which is again on the East side of Turkana, and they began to explore further North. They had a little boat that they could get up and down the shoreline with, but they needed to get inland. And so they decided to use camels.
[00:31:26.42] Now, camels spit at you and bite you, and they're not very comfortable to ride. In fact, you're better off walking with camels than riding them. However, they were riding down one of these dry sand rivers one morning going back to their camp when they spotted on a little edge of a riverbank, which would have washed away in the next rains, a boulder. But this boulder had some eyes that were covered in sandstone, these orbits that you see there. And they eventually cleaned up this fossil, and you can see this almost complete skull of, again, a species similar to the one that they found at Olduvai, with a sagittal crest along the top of its head. This one didn't have teeth, but it belongs to the species Paranthropus boisei.
[00:32:19.17] Hugely exciting to have found that fossil that year. And so they were then able to get back to the work with their own funding and began the work at Koobi Fora, which is this sandy spit that juts out into the lake on the Eastern shore, which is where this little research camp was built in 1970 and 1971.
[00:32:46.59] This place has a lot of wonderful memories for me. I was there as a very young little girl and grew up spending many days of running up and down this shoreline with my younger sister looking for crocodile teeth. It was very hot, so we used to swim in the lake, but there was always had to be somebody looking out for crocodiles. And we used to have a lot of wildlife. These are topi or tiang oryx. There were lion kills at night. It was a really memorable time to be in the North of Kenya.
[00:33:20.40] And so this is a picture, in fact, in 1972, of my mother holding me while she's desperately trying to get the fossil out of my father's hands so that she could actually stick it together, which she then did, and assembled this skull, which is known as a Homo rudolfensis today. But Louis, my grandfather, saw this fossil just before he died. So he was tremendously excited that they were finding different species of hominids, human ancestors from Lake Turkana, as well. So that was the fossil discovery of 1970, as it's sometimes known, as well.
[00:34:06.62] When you're trying to map these sites, it can be quite challenging. So I used to fly a camera off a kite to try and get an image of an excavation. Today, it's obviously quite different. We can use drones, except I find that it's quite challenging to fly a drone, as you can see here, I've worked it out now. You have to have a pilot's license pretty much to get a drone license in Kenya. You have to have a flying medical, as well, to get a flying license to fly a drone.
[00:34:38.88] But we use drones today to map the sites. And one of the things I imagined that very soon we'll be able to do is to fly swarms of drones over sites that we're walking in and be able to use that imagery and upload it to the cloud, and involve citizen scientists around the world to help us actually look for fossils in a more systematic way than we do today, which is just to send teams of fossil hunters out to wander over exposures like this, where they're looking for tiny fragments of bone that are naturally eroding out of these hillsides. And there is no better way to do that other than to have boots on the ground.
[00:35:20.61] The more trained eyes that you have looking for fossils, the better chance you're going to have of finding something. But you'll see how very easy it is to miss a fossil. If you look at this purple surface very carefully, it actually has hidden within it a lower jaw of the fossil found at Allia Bay. I think actually this was found at Kanapoi, which is Australopithecus anamensis. And you can see how it disappears again.
[00:35:52.74] So you have to have your eye in. And if you're wandering along talking about a football match with your friend, you're going to miss it. And so there are many of these fossils that probably lie in wait for one of us to wander across these hillsides and find in due course. But it's only then that we are able to begin to excavate and dig a hole and dig something out.
[00:36:14.86] One of the questions I always get is how on Earth do you know where to dig? But we don't until we find something eroded out onto the surface. So we'll then pick at the sediment, expose the fossil, use hammers and brushes, and we then put all the sediment through these screens, and you shake away the dust and look for tiny fragments of fossil that might be left in the dirt.
[00:36:44.02] Sometimes we have other helpers with us. This is my little Jack Russell called Toot, and she's small enough to come with me and sit in the back of the plane on the luggage. She gets rather hot, though. But she's very much a part of the team.
[00:37:02.48] When I referred to the fact that they didn't know how to record where things came from in the early 70s, they decided what they could do was to cut a hole in the bottom of their aeroplane and attach a Hasselblad camera and fly aerial photographs, lines of photographs, these black and white photographs that would essentially provide a map that they could then use to record where fossils were being found.
[00:37:30.62] So this is one aerial photograph, the number 1398. And that little white line that you see there is a kilometer long airfield. So they represent about 10 kilometers squared. And these little lines are the rivers and sandstone hillsides that you need to then work out where you are in one of these photographs. And when you work out where you are push a pin through it and you write a little number on the back, this is how all the fossils were recorded throughout the '70s and '80s, pre-GPS. Today it's easy. You've got a GPS on your phone and you've got a camera on your phone, and we have no idea the pain that it took to actually find where you were on a map like that.
[00:38:22.54] Of course, hand in hand with all of the work on the prehistory was the geological investigations, trying to actually work out how old the deposits that we were working in were. And so extensive mapping campaigns had taken place alongside all the exploration for fossils. And Frank Brown, Craig Feibel, Kay Behrensmeyer, and other geologists put many, many hours into helping to identify where faults were and how old these different deposits are.
[00:39:00.18] Today, they've all been compiled by Bob Reynolds and Craig Feibel and others on a website called turkanastratigraphy.org, which really allows you today to have a map on an iPad and wander across these hillsides and you know exactly how old the deposits that you're walking in actually are. So this is transformational for the teams of people working in the North of Kenya.
[00:39:27.51] But it's not just the fossils of human ancestors that we are looking for or that we find. They're incredibly rare, indeed. Although in the '70s they were finding 30 hominids a year sometimes, although some could be represented by a single tooth or a bit of mandible, most of what we're finding are fossils of other animals that coexisted on these landscapes with the fossils, or with the human ancestors.
[00:39:59.04] This is actually a pig skull, believe it or not, with a huge tusk that comes out of the top of its skull. Justice is holding the tusk. Justice was with me at Nariokotome when we were excavating the Turkana Boy, when we were both aged about 12. I think he's slightly older than me. We've known each other for a long time.
[00:40:22.97] This is a skull of a crocodile with sunglasses on its nose for scale. This is actually some teeth of an elephant as it's eroding out of the hillside. And sometimes you don't know how much of the fossil is underneath. When you begin to dig away the sediment, you dig yourself into a rather deep hole, and then you have to wonder how on earth you're going to get it out of this hole. It's two tons of dirt and rock.
[00:40:53.75] And so in this case, we actually had to dig away the hillside and then roll it over onto a stretcher that we'd made, and then lift it using a block and tackle and suspend it while we drove a Land Cruiser pickup underneath it to then lower the fossil down into the back of it.
[00:41:13.94] That fossil, once it's been cleaned up, is a beautiful four million year old complete skull of an African elephant, an ancestral African elephant, which you can then today get a beautiful surface scan of. Makes it a lot easier to study. And in fact, the fossil that we were pushing into the lab, which I showed you earlier, was this fossil which spent 10 years in a little hut outside, waiting for us to work out how on earth we were going to bring it indoors, which we eventually did.
[00:41:47.08] This is actually another skeleton of an elephant. This has got some tusks and toe bones. And these are all very exciting finds and warrant publications. This is an actually a ancestral Asian elephant, which, if you estimate its body weight, was over 11 tons and was over four meters at the shoulder, bigger than some of the biggest African elephants that you have today.
[00:42:19.03] But if you didn't have the teams of fossil hunters looking for fossils, we wouldn't have any of these fossils. And so it's credit to them. This is the hominin gang, or the hominid gang, as they were called, led by Kamoya Kimeu and Peter Nzube there, Wambua and Ngenyeo that were part of finding all the early fossils at Lake Turkana, and many of their children now work with us today.
[00:42:46.30] And here's the team of fossil hunters that work with me. And now we finally have some women on board. And I co-lead the work with Jennifer, who is in fact Kamoya's youngest daughter.
[00:43:02.82] So we've made some new finds in recent years, which I'd love to share some of these with you. We published last year in Science a trackway of prints that were left by not one species of hominin, but two different species of hominin. For the very first time, you could see that two different species were using the same shoreline environment.
[00:43:31.33] This site was discovered when we were actually excavating a fossil from a deposit slightly higher up, and they got down below that level and saw a 24 centimeter wide print of a giant stalk. And then we spotted a footprint and said, my goodness, let's bury those and wait till we can get the experts in who know about fossil footprints. And so this is when Kevin Hatala and Neil Roach joined us, and they exposed this trackway of 13 different prints. There are more prints that are still in the hillside that we will at some point be able to open up.
[00:44:11.08] But that was a spectacular find if you're interested in footprints, anyway. My mother always said to me, we know they walked on two legs. Why on Earth do you want to dig up footprints for? So she wasn't particularly impressed. But there you are.
[00:44:26.70] The other thing they did when they were looking for fossils in the 1970s, they took the precaution when they collected a fossil to actually take a black and white image of a man holding a staff at the precise location that the fossil was found. And we've only just discovered these black and white prints because they were held in the archives under lock and key.
[00:44:56.69] And the archivist, as all archivists are, very protective of their archives. And they didn't want anybody to go in and have access to these. We finally persuaded Imelda at the museum to let us have a look at this box of images. And we took some pictures, and we've been able now to get back to these sites and try and recreate the same scene by putting somebody at the same location that the fossil was found at in 1971. So we can get a GPS fix and we can take new images of that site.
[00:45:33.43] So we went back to this site, and you can see that's the hillside as it was, taken at the end of last year. And when we were exploring this little hillside where a fossil in 1971 was found, there were little bits of a limb bone and bits of a skeleton. Pretty scrappy. And I think that's why in 1971, because they had so many wonderful fossils to focus on, that they didn't think this was a particularly impressive one. It didn't have any ends to the bones and there weren't any teeth.
[00:46:10.80] And so when we came back to this site in October last year, we saw little bits of vertebrae that were still eroding out of that hillside. They'd missed some of it, fortunately for us, anyway.
[00:46:25.53] And so this year we took off the top of this hill. And there's more hill to take off, in fact, in a future season. But as we got down to this level, you can see more bits of fossil began to emerge out of the ground.
[00:46:42.00] And so here we are digging up the fossil in February of this year, and much of an upper torso of a hominid has come has been recovered from that hillside, which we're hugely excited about. But it is going to take us months and months to clean up carefully in the lab using consolidant, because it's incredibly fragile, indeed. As I said to you earlier, it's very, very rare to find skeletons of hominins, so this could be tremendously important when we do eventually get it cleaned up.
[00:47:20.72] Another impressive skeleton was found by Kamoya Kimeu in 1984, which you'll all have heard about, which was the discovery of the Turkana Boy or the Nariokotome Boy, which on one of the dry river beds that drain out of the West side, the hills on the West side of the lake, towards the lake exposed sediments. This 1.6 million year old hillside, Kamoya spotted that little piece of the top of a skull and said, my goodness, that has to belong to a human ancestor. And everyone said, well, you're not going to find more of that fossil. What are the chances, really?
[00:48:03.26] And so they began this excavation, and then much of the complete skeleton of the boy, this nine-year-old boy, emerged from that hillside. And Alan Walker worked extensively on this volume describing this fossil of Homo erectus. And that is the species that left Africa for the very first time somewhere around about 1.8 million years ago.
[00:48:29.50] But it has a modern body plan, very much like that of ourselves. But it was a tremendously complete fossil, which was hugely exciting at that time. And I remember as a 12-year-old girl thinking how much fun it was to run across the river with a piece that we'd found in the excavation, and then we'd give it to my mother and Alan. And then this is when obviously a piece actually fit, to great cheer, when we began to assemble this skeleton of the Turkana Boy.
[00:49:06.46] So that was found by Kamoya Kimeu, who you see here with my father. And they both died in 2022. And as a result, I met Jennifer, who I hadn't known until then. Jennifer remembers these wonderful stories that were read to her by her mother in letters sent home by Kamoya to her mother at home. So she grew up on the stories of all the excitement from Lake Turkana that I actually lived through, and I got to know Kamoya incredibly well. He was almost like family.
[00:49:45.31] And today, Jennifer and I co-lead the expedition to the Koobi Fora research project to Lake Turkana. And it's so with Jennifer that we decided that we should really try to inspire the next generation by trying to write these stories in little books that we can get into classrooms throughout East Africa. And so we are writing a series of stories together that we are now calling the Mystery of the Bones series.
[00:50:18.97] And we've written a story first about the discovery of the Turkana Boy, which was 40 years ago that it was found this last year. And then we've also written about the discovery of the Laetoli footprints, the discovery of Paranthropus that rides the camel at Lake Turkana, and other stories that are in the making, as well.
[00:50:44.40] So hopefully, as well as exploring the past, we will inspire the future, as well. So there's a lot of work to be done, and I think we've really set the stage to get East Africans inspired from a very young age, and hopefully they'll feed into the museum system, ultimately, and into positions where they can actually then lead the research and permitting process in government and make this work sort of front and center of what's happening in terms of science in East Africa.
[00:51:21.05] So there's a lot to be happy about and to celebrate. But many thanks to all of the different institutions that have made this work possible over the years. Needless to say, National Geographic continued to fund our work on these little expeditions. We're doing seven months of fieldwork a year at the moment with the teams and the teams of fossil hunters. As I said, without their effort and commitment, we really wouldn't have the fossils that so many of us are involved in studying around the world.
[00:51:55.06] The important work that's coming out of this institute, as well, is thanks to the fossils that are discovered by these teams. So on that note, I think I'll stop and I'll take some questions, and we'll leave it at that.
[00:52:09.43] [APPLAUSE]