Louise Leakey

Six decades - The search for fossils at Lake Turkana

An overview of the discoveries and expeditions of the Koobi Fora Research Project in the Turkana Basin.

FULL TRANSCRIPT 

Please join me in welcoming the president of Stony Brook University, Maurie McInnis. 

Good evening everyone.

Good evening! 

I'm Maurie McInnis, president of Stony Brook University and it is my pleasure to be able to welcome you here to this special international conference paying tribute to Richard Leakey and I am so grateful that we can be together to honor his legacy. It is a privilege personally and professionally to introduce our featured speaker this afternoon, Dr. Louise Leakey, the daughter of Richard and Meave and the granddaughter of Louis and Mary Leakey. Richard Leakey's passing was devastating, but I know that we all find hope in the continuing legacy of discovery carried on by Louise. There's certainly seems to be a familial trait of passion, tenacity, and the drive for discovery. As chair of the International Advisory Board of the Turkana Basin Institute and leader of the Koobi Fora Research Project, Louise is part of the team that continues to reveal critical information about our earliest ancestors every day. The Leakey family legacy at Stony Brook in the Turkana Basin and Kenya and in the world reverberates across generations. 

This evening, Louise will be speaking about the sixth decade journey of paleo anthropology and fossil evidence of early life around Lake Turkana. Louise's childhood was unconventional to say the least. While I was dreaming of adventure while watching Gilligan's Island and Omaha Mutual Wild Kingdom, Louise was actually kind of living it. She was often in the field with her parents in rough conditions, learning on the job, valuable skills such as how to drive off road in Kenya when you can't even see over the steering wheel. But mostly I think she learned the thrill of discovery. She was only 12 when Richard and Meave made the groundbreaking discovery of the Turkana Boy an almost complete skeleton of a juvenile Homo erectus dated about 1.6 million years old. A discovery which spurred a new era of research on early human life, perhaps a discovery that cemented her vision for her own future. 

The discoveries in the Turkana Basin continue to challenge us to see ourselves anew, to learn from the past, to approach our future with greater humility in every discovery is a piece of the mysterious, thrilling puzzle that is our origin story. In every discovery is a mirror. There's no one like Louise Leakey after a truly one-of-a-kind childhood, Louise received her BSc in geology and biology at the University of Bristol and her PhD at the University College London. She then returned to her first passion, field research and fossil hunting and like her father, her heart has never left Kenya and her important research continues to expand our understanding of human origins in the Turkana Basin, including the discovery of a new species from 3.5 million years ago. Louise is a research professor in the Department of Anthropology's Turkana Basin Institute here at Stony Brook, and I've been lucky enough to spend time with her at TBI twice. She even valiantly tried to turn me into a fossil hunter and while the ground was literally littered with evidence of prehistoric animal life, I only found plant roots. But today we had the extraordinary opportunity to journey through time with Louise on two timescales both millions of years ago and the origins of humans and 60 years with the Leakey family discovery of important evidence of that origin story. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Louise leaky to the stage. 

Thank you Maurie for that very kind introduction and thank you all for being here this evening. I know many of you have come from far away and would rather be in the field right now, which is where I would rather be myself. January, I mean June, sorry. June is when the fieldwork always happens and many of us have launched our expeditions and they're out there on the ground and we're busy trying to find out what they're up to, but we will get back to that. So, I appreciate the huge effort that so many of you have made to get over to Stony Brook for this conference in memory of my father, he would've been hugely pleased to see you all here and it is no underestimation of how much work everybody has done to contribute to this incredible story of our past and it's been a real journey with Stony Brook. 

Jim and Marilyn, I just want to acknowledge how much you've done for the Turkana Basin Institute and also for funding research in the Turkana Basin. You've really set in motion a great journey going forward and I just want to acknowledge how much has been done by yourselves in contributing to this journey. This evening I really want to go back through, we are in the sixth decade now of work in the Turkana Basin and I want to go through and tell you some of the stories that were behind some of these major finds over the past decades and touch on just a little skim through those decades to bring to life that story. I also really want to acknowledge the impact of the National Geographic Society in terms of actually supporting the work in the Turkana Basin and namely the Koobi Fora Research Project since my father started working up there in at the end of the 1960s. And you can see he received 34 grants to a tune of about $814,000.

In total, my mother and myself, we've been recipients of about 31 grants from National Geographic to about $1.8 million. It's about $2.7 million. That's not a huge amount of money in if you look at the amount of time that's been spent there. I know people write NSF grants for $5 million and go out and find a handful of fossils, but it is this trickle funding of science, this continued support of fieldwork that meant that we've had boots on the ground every single year since 1968 except for 2001 and 2003. And as a result of that, there have been numerous hominins found over 450 hominin specimens that have come out of the work of the research project. Nine new species of extinct apes and hominins, over 20,000 faunal remains of different specimens and as I said, just an extraordinary amount of field work, three to six months of fieldwork every year since that date. So it is no underestimation how much the Geographic has supported this work and let's hope that they continue to support not only our research project, but many more research projects going forward. 

So actually, interesting to look back historically at when all of the work really began in the Turkana Basin and the one date to note is actually that Lewis, my grandfather, he sent teams of fossil collectors to the Southern Omo deposits in 1942. And there was a lot of interest in Southern Ethiopia and the fossils that were coming out of the lower Omo Valley, but these are the scientific expeditions to that region, the Turkana Basin that really set the stage. Lake Turkana is this enormous, long lake basin that’s in the very northern part of Kenya. You can see there a big river that's flowing into it from the Ethiopian Highlands called the Omo River. It takes me a full hour to fly my single seater Cessna 206 from the south end of that lake to the north end of the lake. It's an exceptionally long lake. 

It takes an hour to fly Nairobi to Lake Baringo. It takes another hour Baringo to the south end of the lake and a third hour to get to the northern end of the lake from the southern point. So it's vast. There are thousands of square kilometers of fossil exposure that need working in. And it's not that once you work there, it's done because you can come back several years later, there's been rain and there are more fossils that have eroded out onto the landscape. So this will be an important area to come back to year after year going forward. In addition to that, this huge amount of time is represented in the deposits at different parts, in different parts of the Lake Basin. So actually, in the very northwestern side of that lake basin, you've got dinosaur deposits, lake Cretaceous dinosaur deposits, and you've got deposits that represent the Oligocene, 30 million year old sites. You've got Miocene sites that are around about 17 million years all the way through to the very recent past of just 10,000 to 4,000 years ago. So it is an exceptional field laboratory for understanding our past. 

The early 1960s there were, as was pointed out today, there was exploration in the lower Omo Valley. There was teams from France and America that were exploring these sediments in the Omo Valley. And my father was asked by Lewis to join an expedition, a French American expedition to the lower Omo Valley in 1967, and he was asked to lead the Kenyan contingent and to explore some deposits that you can see in that picture there. Now the Omo River is an extremely large slow moving river. It's extremely humid because of all of the water and it's very hot and sticky and it's like the Limpopo in the storybooks and full of hippos, lots of colobus monkeys in the gallery forest that lined those rivers. And the river itself is full of crocodiles and hippos. And so they decided to give the young 23 year old the deposits on the wrong side of that river, wrong side, the most difficult side of the river to get to because they needed to get all of their cars, tents, equipment to those series of deposits on the other side. 

And so to do that, they had to actually build a raft to put their vehicles on. You can see here this is a raft that one of the expedition members designed called Paul Abel. And they were then able to drive a car onto that and they decided sensibly to test whether that raft would be able to take a vehicle and you hold onto a rope and it actually would get to the other side. And they found it was far too strong for the little engine that they had on that raft. So they had to wait. So they waited for another engine to be sent up from Nairobi. Meanwhile, my father, and this is described in his book, “One Life” had access to a little wooden boat and they would happily cross back and forth to the exposures on the other side in their little wooden boat until one day this very large crocodile decided they were quite interesting. 

And no sooner had this big crocodile come after them, did all the other crocodiles choose to join in. And they made absolutely hightailed it from the middle of the stream where they were confidently back and forth to the riverbank. And it happened on a second time before they decided enough of that they were going to get a tin boat, which wasn’t sinkable, and they finally got a bigger engine and they moved themselves across to the right side of the river reducing the number of crossings. But they found some very important fossils in that year. They represent some of the earliest fossil evidence of our own species Homo sapiens. And so although they weren't considered to be highly significant at that time, nowadays, they are increasingly in the discussion of when did our own species emerge, which is thought now to be slightly earlier than that. On that trip there to the Omo, the American team had access to this rather dragonfly like looking helicopter. 

It looks like it's got rather big bulbous eyes. They flew south across the border into the northern part of Kenya from southern Ethiopia and landed on the eastern shores of the lake. And when they landed there, my father convinced that he was going to fossils because he'd seen exposures from the airplane flying north to the Omo Valley. They landed and they found stone tools and fossils and he had found his own little patch to work in and he then asked National Geographic for an initial grant to actually go back to this area the following year and begin his own explorations of the Turkana Basin. You can imagine the surprise of these three Daasanach men when this helicopter emerged out of the sky and these men jumped out of it and sort of scattered, but the photographer Bob Campbell, who took this photograph tells me what they were more interested in was the reflections of themselves in the glass windscreen, which they find to be very amusing because they'd never seen what they looked like at all.

That was how they landed on the eastern shores at Ileret. And the following years, I said they were able to then mount an expedition with all of their gear and equipment and head up to sort of the middle part of the eastern side of that Long Lake basin, a place called Alia Bay. Bernard Wood, who's in the audience, Kay Behrensmeyer, I think you were all part of those very early days on the eastern side of Lake Turkana. Some of the field journals are well worth reading, and they used to give themselves stars for good behavior. My father invariably got many black points and black marks, and they improved when he'd bring in good provisions from Nairobi and his airplane. But they set up this very basic camp and they began to explore inland. Now, they didn't actually know how old anything was, and nor did they have any way of referencing anything that they found. 

If you imagine once you pick a fossil up and you take it out of context, it has no relevance anymore. So they initially had drawn these little sketch maps in a journal. The following year they decided to mount an extensive aerial survey where they flew long lines of photographs from an airplane. And those photographs are the reference for everything that's followed in terms of when you pick up a fossil, they'll then put a little pinprick through that photograph and mark a number on the backside of it. So even right through to when I first started working at Lake Turkana in the early 90s, we were still using aerial photographs as our main way of marking where fossils are found. Obviously today you've got a GPSs on your phone. You can actually call someone in Nairobi when you run out of cabbages. Those days there were just HF radios hoped somebody was going to fly in with supplies and you really had to then find ways of actually marking what was actually found and documenting the fossils. 

So they head off in land on these camels because of course it's a large distance from Nairobi to the north, all your fuel and supplies had to come in from Nairobi by road. And so to save on fuel, they decided if they really wanted to explore, let's try camels. And they used these camels to head north and explore some of the fossil sites they couldn't get to in the closer proximity to where they were camped, amazing days. And on this photograph, which was a National Geographic photograph, my parents there, at the back and Kamoya Kimeu and a man called Peter Nzuve Mutiwa, and they were the core team of fossil hunters in those early years. And they set off and camels have these amazingly soft broad feet that they don't like to walk over rock. They designed not to sink into sand dunes. And so these soft feet do not like to walk over these jagged piece of sandstones on these hillsides. 

And so they had to where possible head back down through these little dry riverbeds. And this is exactly what they were doing, heading back one evening towards their camp when they spotted a little boulder in this dry sand river bed. And you can see them pouring over this thing there in the sand. And actually, it is a skull, complete skull covered in sandstone matrix. At the top right at that corner, there's a little pile of belongings and I just need to point out, there's a pipe and some tobacco. My father unusually in this photograph has not got the pipe in his mouth. I don't think he smoked it that much, but he liked the pose of having a pipe in his mouth and there's a camera lens, there is a dental pick and there's a little tube of durofix. Now that's a smell of that glue I will remember forever because it was always around. 

Every fossil was stuck with this glue called durofix, which they then stopped making. That was the skull of 406. It was the same fossil that had been found at Olduvai and beyond, but it really put the Turkana Basin on the map, and it opened up new interest in the research there and they were able to get additional funding to do this. Now that was, I think it was August 5th that this fossil was found. And as you are camping at Lake Turkana and you look up to the night sky, one thing that you'll always be struck by at Turkana is how silent it is, but also how dark the night sky is. And you look up and you have shooting stars and you can see the milky way across the sky. And a few weeks before they found  the skull of 406, man landed on the moon, right? 

So the Apollo 11 mission when you had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin step onto the moon, and I think they would've been sitting there under the stars talking about this extraordinary event. How far had we come as humanity from sort of these old ancestors they were finding all the way through to getting ourselves onto the moon. Now, Kamoya was a vivid dreamer, and he had this wonderful story he told me where he dreamt that Richard asked him to go to the moon to find fossils, which he did. And he went all the way there, looked around and came back with a handful of fossils, which he then walked into the office of my father and said, here Richard, I found some things and he was told they were useless, they were far too old. 

So that was a wonderful story and he told me that many years later, but absolutely would not believe that man had landed on the moon was Peter Nzuve. And I remember many years later when they landed a little lander on Mars and he said, this is fake news. Absolutely wouldn't accept it at all. So we often sit there under the stars and tell these wonderful stories of what's going on in the real world. In 1970s, these were remarkable years hugely exciting as Bernard alluded to in his talk earlier, these fossils were coming out fast and furious, particularly the hominin fossils. They didn't quite know how to keep up with publishing them all and there were really discovery after discovery and they would see something and they would remember seeing something somewhere. They would go back and pick it up. But this was also the year when they set up a camp on the shores of the lake. 

This is a spit that's called Koobi Fora and Koobi For a there you can see they've actually established these little grass thatch roofs over these little tin huts. And they used to then come and go from this base camp, which was the home for much of the research going forward. Koobi Fora 1973 was bang in the middle of what they then established as Sibiloi National Park because it was so rich, not only in fossil sites, but also in wildlife. And there was Topi, the Tiang that were there. They had Oryx, Gerenuk, Kudu. In those early days there were actually rhino left and giraffe, lots of wonderful crocodiles, shorebirds a really fabulous protected area. But sadly today very little wildlife remains. And this is something that needs to be thought of in terms of how can we restore this protected area because it is a jewel of a national park. 

There are also lions and cheetahs, but the lions in National Park there had one amazing adaptation. They had learned how to catch crocodiles and they would come down in the evening to the Lakeshore and quite often in the morning we would see them dragging these crocodiles longer than themselves, way, way inland up to two kilometers inland. So those are since long gone, sadly. 1972, this was the year that Louis died in October of that year. But in August, they actually found this remarkable fossil, which was clearly something different to the one that had been found in the dry riverbed with the camels. It was much bigger brained, it was clearly on our own ancestral line, the genus Homo, and it was assembled from hundreds of little pieces of fossil fragments by my mother, Meave, and she was sticking that together. I was a tiny little baby in those days. 

You can see I'm under her arm. But my father then flew this fossil back to Nairobi, to my mother's absolute horror because she was having so much fun sticking it together and took it and showed him this find about just a few weeks before he then left for America and sadly left us. So that was a very exciting find, 1972. But those were the early years my childhood, which I remember really fondly up in the lake shore. We used to fly up weekends. My father was busy trying to establish the national museums in Kenya in those days, build things that would last a long time for Nairobi as well as trying to manage the work at Lake Turkana, he was traveling a lot, he was filming for a series called “The Making of Mankind” as well. And so lots of things were going on in those years. 

So flying in and out of the east side of the lake and dragging us along as children was very much part of what we did. The kitchen was amazing, as you can see in this picture, that was an avgas canister, a metal can that they used to carry fuel, aviation fuel in and that would be converted into little oven and out of that oven would come huge loaves of bread and wonderful even had a sponge pudding covered in treacle that as a child we will never forget the taste of. We didn't have much option to swim in the lake unsupervised and so we made do with basins of water, which we thought were our swimming pool. I don’t why we sat there. This is my sister Samira and myself sat there wearing rubber rings in basins of water. They used to keep us quiet for many, many hours and we'd be dragged out occasionally to excavate a fossil every now and then, but that got rather boring after a little while, we'd rather be back at the lake shore.

So, we had really had a very idyllic childhood, snakes, crocodile eggs, lion kills in front of the mess. It was a lot of fun, but I wasn't particularly enamored by the world of fossils and hadn't really much intention of pursuing this. My father, as I said, would come in and out from Nairobi because he was busy trying to establish the building of the Louis Leakey Memorial Hall and laboratories in Nairobi to house fossils. He felt very strongly that fossils needed a place to be kept that was not outside of Africa, outside of the country. And this is why he put his effort into building the museum that you see there today. Little known to myself and my sister, my father wasn't very well and towards the end of the 1970s he had to head off to have a first kidney transplant and his brother Philip, gave him a kidney, which he then survived. 

But we were shipped off to England as young kids put into a tiny little school in London, which was not so sure why we were there at the time. But he wrote his memoirs while he was on a dialysis machine from the hospital because actually he wasn't too sure he was going to survive it. So, my father has always had lived on borrowed time and this seemed to come back time and time again. The 1980s, these were obviously he was better, he'd survived it and that's time to get back out into the field again. And so there were many efforts to explore, not just the sites on the east side of the lake, but they started to work on sites on the western side of Lake Turkana as well. And in the early 1980s, Kamoya Kimeu who was on that early expedition and had worked with my father for many, many years, had spotted this piece of skull, which is really the size of a quarter, and he'd recognized that through its texture and shape that that must belong to a human ancestor. 

And to everybody's disbelief, when they began this excavation, they got closer and closer to the roots of a little thorn tree, which this upturned skull was essentially serving as a flowerpot for the little thorn tree. The seed decided it was a good place to grow and held within its roots were more bits of the skull and they then found more of its skeleton over the coming weeks. This was the time I was aged about 12, and I was far more interested as Maurie pointed out and learning to drive land rovers collecting water from the dry sand rivers. This is also the year that I met Isaiah Nengo, who sadly passed away last year as well. And him and I spent many hours on the Lakeshore actually wet sieving the dirt that was coming out of this excavation, digging more and more of that skeleton. But a complete skeleton of Homo erectus emerged from this site dated about 1.6 million years ago and really was, I think it's probably one of Kenya's most spectacular finds to date. 

Not too far away again from where this site was Alan Walker had found another species. It's much older. This was named Paranthropus aethiopicus. It's about 2.5 million years old, but that was also found in the 80s of was very, very exciting find at that time as well. And so just so many new and exciting things were beginning to come out of the efforts at Lake Turkana. Camp life of course was amazing. You had these tents under these thorn trees, along these dry sand rivers. My father absolutely loved to cook, so he was always in the kitchen there bent over a stove, and you can see there, he's sort of making a sauce for the evening dinner. Alan Walker was very insistent that you have fluffy towels and white tablecloths. We don't have our camps in this way these days. We're on the floor on bed rolls in tiny little pup tents, but they really camped in style and the story goes in fact that they once flew lobsters all the way out from Maine. And they were alive when they arrived at Lake Turkana in Nariokotome, which is the first was served up to the horror of the people that were in the kitchen in that day. They looked like really rather extraordinary insects; we don't have lobsters at Turkana.

Other sites were discovered or explored earlier sites and Miocene sites, Oligocene sites and new species of early apes were then named. This is all going on throughout the 1980s but my father, bear in mind at that time was very involved in the museum in Nairobi directing this organization and growing the collaborations with other institutions and trying to raise funding to make sure that it lasted going forward. But Kenya was also losing a lot of elephants to ivory poaching and we were losing over 40 elephants a week at that time. So he got very vocal about the fact that this was going on because he had such big outreach through the institution he was working in. And so the then President Moi said, well, if you think there's such a big problem, sir, why don't you come and fix it? 

So, he was announced as now heading up the Department of Wildlife over the 1 o'clock news and he was out of a job and into another one, which then meant of course they had very little time to spend working in the field of prehistory in Lake Turkana. And so, the expedition and the work in the north really was then left to my mother Meave to carry on with. So that picture that you see there is actually of a very large fire. They burnt 12 tons of ivory that had been in the stockpile of the Kenya Wildlife Service. And what do you do when you have that much ivory? You don't want to put it back into the market because that will just add to the problem. So, he decided it would be best to torch it and make a statement that Kenya did not place a value on ivory, and that it really then told the world that there was a problem that needed to be dealt with and was able to swing public opinion, push the elephant onto higher citing appendix listing. 

And sure enough, the price of ivory plummeted and was able to address that problem temporarily at least. This is obviously something that we'll have to face going forward and is still a big problem in some parts of the world. So in the 1990s, this is the, he wasn't involved obviously in day-to-day running of the expeditions because now he was trying to revamp the wildlife sector. That became quite political. My mother was busy working in a site called Lothagam. Lothagam is on the western side of Lake Turkana, and it's this amazing range of hills where they've been pushed up and you've got these two sort of ridges either side and in between there you've got sediments that go back between 8 and 5 million years. They're also much more recent deposits either side. So an incredibly rich fossil site and was thought to be an important place to work because you would then be finding fossils of things that predated the fossils that they'd found on both the east and other sites on the west of the lake. 

But on one morning they were out working and an airplane came up towards them, and this was unexpected. You didn't expect to have an airplane show up unannounced in the middle of the morning. And they came with news that my father had had an accident, an airplane accident. My mother then had to head off to join him, and I was then asked to come up to Lake Turkana and take over the expedition that year, which I did. And actually that's what then eventually got me involved in this field work after all. But those were the very exciting years, although they didn't find any complete or really significant fossil hominids from those series of hills in the 1990s. There was a really beautiful range of fossil mammals and other animals that were recovered. These are Mauricio Anton's artistic renditions of some of the animals that were found from Lothagam. And it resulted in a beautiful monograph, a publication that really went through all the different groups. It was a major volume that came out of Lothagam. 

So when he got back having recovered from his accident and he had a double amputation of his legs below the knees, he then decided to do everything that he'd ever done before. So he would drive a gear stick car to work just to prove everyone that he could do it. He actually flew an airplane again, which was terrifying. I remember sitting on the right hand seat trying with my feet on the pedals just to make sure that we stopped at the end of the runway because with prosthetic legs, you can't move your ankles forward, which is how you stop an airplane. So you'd have to pick his whole legs up and hope he hit the pedals. He rode horses, he came back up to Lake Turkana to work on fossils, but without legs, you feel 20% hotter at any time of day because you don't have that surface area from which to lose heat. 

So, he was in this picture helping to plaster a fossil elephant skull from a site called Kanapoi. Kanapoi is an amazing series of hills from 3.5 million to 4 million years or thereabouts, covered in these pebbles that you can see here. And a man called Peter Nzuve, who as I've mentioned him before with the team, made this extraordinary find, which if you look very carefully, there is the mandible of Australopithecus anamensis that was found at Kanapoi in those early years. And you can see how it disappears. And there you the mandible that was then extracted and was then named a new species Australopithecus anamensis from that time period, so a major find. I then got involved in the work in the Turkana basin and have many fond years working with my mother on sites on that side of the lake. 

I learned to fly when I was 18. I thought it was a useful thing to do. My daughter's 18 now and the younger daughter is 16 and she's decided that she's learned to fly a drone. She decided she'd rather have her feet on the ground, which seems clever, however, it has served me very well. But this little airplane that you see here is a two-seater airplane. And I flew many, many hours with my mother and knowing now what it's like to have an 18 year old daughter, let alone driving a car, let alone flying an airplane. I really admire my mother's confidence in me in those early years. This airplane, we used to borrow from my Uncle Jonathan and little, very simple engine. And we were flying up north one day, about eight and a half thousand feet. And I looked out the window and I said to her, oh, there's a nice little range of deposits down, should we go and have a look?

She says, oh yes, let's go down. So, I pull back on the throttle and down we go and then the engine splutters and actually stopped and we were really in the middle of nowhere. And I suddenly quickly got, oops, popped back in the throttle and the engine started up again. In hindsight, I probably should have flown back to Nairobi, but we decided to carry on because we wanted to check on the sites up at Kanapoi instead. So we carried on and when we did come into land and I had the runway in sight and I pulled back on the throttle again, the engine stopped again. But we made the landing and as we jumped out the airplane, there was fuel pouring down the nose wheel and I had to fly to Germany the following day. So we leapt into a Land Rover having checked on the site and drove 16 hours back through the night to get back in time to do this. 

And when they opened up the airplane on the ground in Kanapoi, the carburetor was full of little insects. And so the needle had got stuck and it was what we had a rich fuel cut as they call it. So that was fixed enough we went again, and you can see I'm actually standing on the wing of the airplane fueling the plane in that image. And on another occasion a journalist who was with us decided to help me fuel the airplane and put their hand on the windscreen and cracked it, passing a jerry can of fuel up to on the roof. And so this is us trying to now stitch the windscreen. We had a little pot of coals which we poked a wire into, and I'm not particularly good at sewing, but I think we did a fine job of this, which enabled us to get back to Nairobi safely. At the end of the 1990s, this amazing find was made by team with my mother from a site called Lomekwi. 

I was actually working sites further north at that time as part of my PhD studies. But this discovery was made and a new genus Kenyanthropus was named as a result of it because we felt it represented something different to Australopithecus afarensis from Ethiopia, which was considered to be sort of where all later hominins came from. So it was a highly important find, but while we were exploring those deposits as part of my PhD, I came through several different sites that had stone tools in them. And I was told at that time that those stone tools must be, they couldn't be stone tools at sites of this age. Many years later, 10 years or so later, Sonia Harmand, who's part of the faculty here at Stony Brook until she's sadly moving away from Stony Brook, but she came across these sites and sure enough, there are stone tools. 

An archeologist of note was able to say this is the case and they are dated the earliest stone tools are now accepted at 3.3 million years, which is remarkable. Into the 2000s and I've got to be aware of time, I think we're moving swiftly forward here for the year 2000. This decade I managed to meet my husband and have two children. I don’t how that happened in there, but it did but that's in another story. But this amazing skull was found by colleague Kyalo Manthi who's in the audience here today, and he now heads up a museum department that's represented, that's responsible for all the sites and monuments in Kenya. And we were collecting fossils and headed back to the car one afternoon and he said, there's an interesting looking ear here. And I was very hot and bothered and ready to get into the car to go back to the camp for lunch. 

And my mother, who I can never really keep up with in the field in those days, we kept walking faster trying to keep up with each other, and I was carrying the heavy load of fossils, sat down and Kyalo showed her this ear hole. And I remember her clearly saying that ear is, there's only one thing that has an ear of that size. And I thought, well, we definitely aren't going to get back to camp this evening after all. And we didn't, we carried on way until the early hours of the evening excavating that skull out of the ground. And Kyalo, you can see there is digging this out. And that was a major find that showed that Homo erectus was clearly there was a huge range in size of the brain capacity of this species. Into of the first decade of 2010 and beyond really and this is really when my father, who always felt that time was running out as he just had a second kidney transplant. My mother gave him a second kidney in 2006, which is actually when I was heavily pregnant and in the field still trying to run things in those days. The Turkana Boy, yeah, Turkana Boy was 1980s. Yeah, I spoke a little bit about that earlier, Jim. Yeah, that was early in 1984. 

So in 2010 or thereabouts in that decade, this is when my father really felt it was important not only to have established facilities to store fossils and make sure science happened in Kenya and not beyond, but he felt it was time to actually put infrastructure in the north of Kenya to enable science to happen there at a pace that would actually mean that he could resolve some of these outstanding questions of which he had many. He didn't think that our team was working fast enough to provide him the answers. And so he decided to build more concrete buildings both on the west and the east side of Lake Turkana where people could then come in and launch their expeditions and go forward and do the work. And I think this is really when this all began to happen. And today you have really world-class facilities which many, many researchers are now using, and certainly many things are beginning to come out of the exploration of multiple teams and multiple collaborations. 

I just want to take note that we wouldn't know anything about where we were and how old any of these sites were had it not been for the extraordinary work of many of the geologists who've worked in the Basin for so many years. It's so important to know how old the sites that you are working are. And so many geologists come through with making lots of detailed maps and notes and scattered in all sorts of different places. And there's been a tremendous effort by Bob Reynolds who is also with us today to try and bring together all of this information and put it somewhere that everybody can actually access and take it online digitally. So, he's actually built a website turkanastratigraphy.org where you can actually, it's a fantastic resource to explore the stratigraphy of the Turkana Basin and beyond. And I think it's really the first time ever that you can go into the field with an iPad, with a geological map and see where you are on that map. 

And our field crew now use this as a tool to actually go and work out where to look for fossils. And this is how they found a most recent discovery that I'll show you right at the very end. But this effort is a monumental task and it's a huge shout out to Bob for having made that possible for future generations who plan to work in the area. Amazing photograph, National Geographic photograph here of Kamoya Kimeu and my father in the early days working at Lake Turkana with a fabulous headgear no less. But I wanted to just introduce you to Kamoya’s daughter, youngest daughter called Jennifer, who you can see in this photograph who I met. Sadly, Kamoya passed away the same year my father did. And she reached out to me in that year to ask her to help to raise some support to pay for her father's hospital bills and his burial. 

And many of you in this room, I think helped to raise that funding for Kamoya's family. And so, she came to thank me, and I said, “Jennifer, what a pleasure to meet you”. I hadn't met her before and she had never been to Lake Turkana. And so, her whole understanding of Turkana was through letters written by Kamoya to her mother that she would then be read to at bedtime. And she remembers many of the same stories that I lived through these letters. And so, I said, “Wonderful to have you here today. Would you like to work with me going forward?” And we've now launched a whole new effort to try to tell these stories that she remembers through a series of digital cartoons, both in print and also on handheld devices and animations where she and I will be characters in these cartoons telling stories such as the Turkana Boy discovery that you see here. 

And they're not just in English, these are in any number of different languages. So we are translating into certainly 10 local Kenyan languages, but these can be translated to languages around the world. So this is a new effort and it'll be led by Jennifer. And she is so like her father in so many ways. We are having a super time working on this project together. Important also just to say that behind every great character is always a remarkable person who supports them. And here I must mention my mother Meave, who was really by my father's side every step of the way. And she has a very different view of the work in Turkana, obviously, because she's spent many hours there that were often very lively discussions at the dinner table amongst the family. We didn't always agree on everything, but she has written her story through a book called “The Sediments of Time. 

And I must thank here my sister Samira, who really made this book happen, working long, long hours with my mother to tell those stories. And it's a very important read through her eyes and it's her story. Sadly, this book was published just as Covid hit and so she never got a chance to really launch the book and tell everyone, but I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to read this story through her eyes. And it's a very interesting take on her work and her perception of it. Also, just to thank not just my team of fossil hunters, but there are so many people who are out there every day looking for these fossils in different parts of the continent. 

Without them, we would never find anything. I mean, we really owe it to them to have made these fines. And many people obviously here today work with teams throughout these different field sites. And they're really incredibly dedicated people who are well adjusted to working in the hot sun, in the dust for months and months on the end. It's very rare that you find these important and exciting finds, and it takes those long hours and dedication and patience to actually make that happen. One of the team here you can see is Ibre and he came from a community to the east of us and he joined us a couple of years ago and he spotted something on the hillside just the other day. This was July of last year. Sadly, my father missed seeing this find, but he would've been hugely excited to have seen it. 

And he spotted this little face that's just coming out of the ground and it's being cleaned up as we speak. And I'm not going to say too much more about that at this point in time, other than to say that we do have a nice new head from the east side of Lake Turkana, which my father had actually gone and told the team, “For heaven's sakes, you guys, it's time you found a new skull, it's been far too long”. And sure enough, we did just that soon after he left. But I also want to recognize how many incredible people left us, not just last year, but they all had huge influence on my life. My father, Kamoya, Isaiah, who passed away soon after my father, Frank Brown, Mutiwa Nzuve, Bill Kimbell, Glenn Isaac, who was really there and through those early years, and Alan Avacopan, who he lost this year, and Bob Campbell a few years ago, who took so many of these photographs. 

They really left a great legacy and I think there's sort of a very high bar to match when it comes to enthusiasm, exploration, and discovery. And really to come back to where I started at the very beginning of this talk, funding fieldwork is really important. And to get boots on the ground to making these new finds is really, really necessary. And it doesn't take a lot of support to actually make that happen. And I think setting up the institute and the support that's coming from so many of you to make sure that this works in perpetuity is something that we are really grateful for. And I hope we can encourage many more people to get involved in this story of where we all came from going forward. So thank you all, and I'd just like to end on thanking everybody who's been involved in this field over the years. So, on that note, we'll stop. Great time for a drink, I think, or anyone have any questions? What is your format? Do you want to go? We go. You can take a couple of questions. Couple of questions for anyone before we go. 

How do you protect the site from poachers? 

How do we protect the site from poachers, fossil sites? In general? It's very strictly monitored working any of these fossil sites. You can't just go in and work, you have to have permissions and you have to report to local administration where you're working. You have to apply to the national museums who that get permission from the ministry to actually work those areas. And so in general, if you come into a site, somebody's going to ask who are they? And so we send out advanced parties to make sure that the local administration know who we are. It hasn't been a big threat in the Turkana Basin necessarily because we're so remote, but it could very much become a threat going forward. So it's an important point you raised there. It really varies site to site, but the hope is that if you are working with communities, people from those areas, that if somebody unexpectedly shows up with a spade, that you need to ask a few questions and stop them walking off with it. Alrighty, thank you so much. Okay.

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