Marta Mirazón Lahr

Richard Leakey, the Turkana Basin, and new frontiers of paleoanthropological discoveries

One of the most important of Richard Leakey’s many legacies is the establishment of the Turkana Basin as one of the major palaeontological and archaeological areas of the world. But this legacy goes beyond his discovery of Koobi Fora and all his and subsequent work around the basin. Richard supported and inspired exploration and discovery, as well as the building of collections and the institutions that curate them. In this talk, I will discuss the role of rich areas, such as Turkana, in the building of models of human evolution, use our work in Turkana, and Richard’s influence on how it developed, to illustrate the potential of rich sites to challenge some long-standing views, and end with a call for new sites, new areas and new challenges.

FULL TRANSCRIPT 

I was also asked by Lawrence and Fred, if I could say something about the conference itself and then I'll start with this picture of Richard sitting at TBI. We all recognize the wall, right? And I like to think that he would be so chuffed with this meeting. He would love it because just the thought that TBI is the fulcrum that brought all these people together and that actually the number of people working now out of TBI at the Turkana Basin in Kenya has grown exponentially and all sorts of things are being done. So I think he would have loved it. Okay? However, you have to remember what happened this week and I stayed till 3:30 AM putting these pictures together, so please pay attention. 

So what do we have? We had talks about Richard himself and his work and TBI and the first of those talks was by Woody who told us a very personal story of his long, long friendship with Richard and all they did together and how that friendship was maintained to the end, and it was cemented through the science. We heard from Louise, where is Louise? We heard from Louise about her dad, but also about what started at Koobi Fora and ended up 60 years later being, what does she say, that 452 hominin specimens just staggering achievement. We heard from Dino about the future of this institution going even beyond the paleosciences to embrace other aspects of ecology, epidemiology, modern populations, and a new chapter in the history of TBI. We also heard from Patricia to remind us that Richard, yes, he was a scientist, but he was a deep conservationist too, which in this conference we didn't talk. 

Then I sort of lumped together, I'm afraid all the people who had bits of theory, models, data, and I know it's not a coherent grouping here, but we had Rob telling us about Endemism, dynamic processes, the Afro-tropical model. We had Carrie telling us about new phylogenies, new ways of analyzing large bodies of data to revisit the relationship of early hominins. Then we had two very different renditions of what it took to be a modern human, and it's fabulous to actually look at two very different perspectives on what that problem is. John, this morning, sorry John, I just couldn't add this morning's talks properly, but John was telling us about the new frontiers and perhaps something we notice. So, if you're in Europe, so much is about Neanderthals and Neanderthals nowadays is all about ancient DNA and admixture and introgression and site formation and how many times you can plot a stone tool with a total station, but those new frontiers will come also to the tropics, maybe with paleoproteomics in state intervention, DNA, but they will come. He also raised major issues about repatriation. That's a conversation to be had in more detail. We also had talks about the nature of the data itself. So, we heard through Daniel from Mikael and Indre about how our data are all full of biases and problems, et cetera, but let's make something out of those issues. Let's use the data in a way that actually those issues become part of what we're looking at. And then we heard from Denne’, let's create huge databases. Let's put the data out there. 

It was very late, so I stopped writing little notes I'm afraid, bear with me. Okay, so I put together all the isotopers and I was then surprised. I said, well, there's only four of them after this week. I thought they were like 15. How come these four people made so much noise? It was quite extraordinary. Anyway, we had a fabulous set of isotope talks and the permeation doesn't exist. The reach of the isotope data and looked at also from the stories that Julia and Thure told us of how difficult it was at the beginning and how they were not accepted, and they kept insisting this data, we should be paying attention. This is a way of looking at the past and then the success and now diets, temperature, ecologies, carbonate soils, they're everywhere. Anyway, but there was only four of them. 

Then I put together also Tapho, Geo, Geochron, Crohn, et cetera, and these were also fabulous, right? So we had Kay given us a masterful talk, which will at least I'll go home and watch again and perhaps again. And among the many things, I know there was a focus on the scales of questions and scales of the evidence, but I thought she was saying there isn't that much difference. The systems are stable and that should be something to be considered when we're looking at them all. Craig, amazing and the future of all the core data and the studies, et cetera. And lovely to hear again about the pigs and how the pigs were very unhappy. We heard from Patrick with the role of petrology and the potential that petrology can bring to the whole system and that we're probably seriously underusing, not for long Patrick. And then we had three talks which I loved. Well, first of all, Troy's excitement. One was it was contagious. Daryl, you were not that excited. 

And Marin with her luminescence. What is special about the three talks, even though they were given us case studies and examples, is that they're all breaking ground on dating methods and this is just as stunning. So, the opportunities, so I work in a part of the chronology, the dating is a serious issue. So to have people there trying to solve the problem of how we date different sediments, it was fantastic. And then I went chronological. So, we had two talks on the Oligocene. That's Natasha with hyraxes will associate now forever. The Oligocene with hyraxes. We had John telling us about the missing years and extraordinary. This is quite extraordinary when you think about it. The amount of information that is filling that gap. So this is an extraordinary achievement. Then we had the Miocene again, when you look at it, there are not that many, and it seems that most of the conference was on the Miocene. 

There's some disparity here happening. Anyway, the Miocene was fantastic. We heard today two fabulous talks. I thought they were amazing. A new ape, skeleton of the middle Miocene, the analysis of this enormous data set to give us ecological structures and insights onto those structures that was fabulous. Kevin, telling us about the diets and the carbonate and the past and in the Miocene sites and many other sites too. And Ellen who left by the way, telling us about the marvel of Buluk. I wanted to fight because last year with Louise, we went to Ileret for two days and I saw the team there under microscope picking out from imagine a pile of sand that we would normally throw away. They were picking up teeth that they were half a millimeter in size or less, and they sat there day after day picking up these hundreds of microfauna, which are now being surface scanned. 

So imagine that we will not have to squint under the microscope. Anyway, I told Ellen that this entire conference will be there when she blows up the basalt. I think we all should be there. Then we had the Pliocene, and the Pliocene is fantastic. The last talk right now by Denise, how much we're learning from it. We heard about diversity, Woranso-Mille we now hear about diversity. Oops, sorry. Oh, I'm being disastrous. Wait about diversity in the environments of afarensis, we heard from Kyalo, he showed us his beautiful Lomekwi mandible. We still going to think what will that be? We heard from Jason again about diversity at Ileret and then of course the tools, the amazing Pliocene tools that we now have with a promise of more news to come rather mysterious. We then went into the early Pleistocene and the theme was, again, diversity, which is really interesting, this reassessment of what we know. 

So, what we had a talk by Jose who told us even the famous skull with the marks of the carnival, probably another taxon, but also looking into the new traits that can actually give us insights that are not homoplastic and that is so critical right now. We heard from Cody probably more than this audience ever wanted to know about the ankle, but super interesting ankles. But again, his identification of two groups of ankles, which is very interesting. And then we heard from Lucia who's also looking at sort of in detail rather obsessively at boisei, and again coming out with, “Hey, what if there is a structure here?” Why? If there was an older population and a slightly later population and they're doing somewhat different things with those isotopes. Isotopes again. And then we heard from Nacho who's saying, know we have to rethink aspects of the Oldowan- Acheulian transition. 

We should probably get rid of the moment they have these bifaces; we should think of them as Acheulian, but then we should recognize also that diversity inside. Then we jump to sort of late middle Pleistocene and upper Pleistocene, and we heard of these strange things. Where is Lee? Is Lee in the room? I just told him, you know, have to find something normal one day and publish it in AJPA. Okay, this is just so outlandish by the minute, challenging everything we thought. But that is part of it, isn't it? Is if you find a creature out there that doesn't fit your expectations of brain size, doesn't fit your expectations of chronology, doesn't fit your expectations of where they lived. Do you know they were cooking deep in the cave? Why go into a tunnel to go cook your meal? And now this issue of the deposition, the mortuary situation of all these bodies, the number of children. 

So, whatever we make out of naledi will be something that we never thought of before. Then we heard from Ozzie, I'm sorry I didn't put a picture of John because this is a joint work with John and he was telling us about all these new bits of Omo-Kibish, which for me remain the first true modern humans, whatever they want to make out of Jebel Irhoud. And from Kyalo again, because he was telling us about Natodomeri which you haven't seen. They're still working, prepping this skeleton, but they have a whole skeleton of a person there at 200, 230 Kyalo? So amazing new things coming there. And finally, the last few thousand years or the present, linking the present to the past, we had Emmanuel telling us wonderful things about the pastoralists in the past, in the Turkana Basin that has the earliest pastoralists in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

The pastoralists today with those beautiful GPS cows moving about, which I thought was amazing and that important link of learning from the past to the present. And then we heard from Krishna about the genetics, a super update. And this has stayed with me. Do you know 10,000 ancient genomes and less than 3% are African. We have to do something about that to get a tropical genome. We were part of a study in tropical Southeast Asia is so much work. It doesn't mean there is no DNA, but the endogenous DNA is minuscule. So, the investment to actually amplify sufficient DNA is enormous and because it will tend to be recent, it will not be a huge publication. So the big labs are not interested, but it means that for us who work in Africa, we're left out of the story. So for me, that is a very serious issue. Okay, a summary of all this and some thoughts. So what do I take out of this week? A lot of food. But first of all, a sense of discovery. This discovery of new ideas, new models, new methods, new fossils, new artifacts, new data, and it was fascinating, it's always fascinating.

Open science. Denise there is a minute ago I said I'm among friends know I'm going out on a limb here, but I think this might be where I'm going to know we showed data that has not been published. We shared ideas that we haven't written yet, and that is very special. That is where the scientific community is. Collaborations, TBI has brought a lot of us together and conferences like this, hopefully with Covid behind us, do it again because we meet people, we talk, we say, oh, saw you on Twitter, and we plan and we said, oh, we could do this together and together is always more interesting, always more fun. Bob's maps, I think we all take out of the conference as such an amazing admiration for Bob's maps and appreciation because it will change how we survey, and it will change how we go about the space. The importance and challenges of lampposts. I think this group will not forget Bernard's lampposts, and obviously that's the only place where we have light. So that's the only data we find. But we shouldn't forget that there are lampposts. The early career researchers in this room. I thought you were fabulous. You gave polished papers, interesting papers, cutting-edge analysis. You are just fabulous. You should all be extremely proud of yourselves. I go back Richard, Meave, TBI, the catalyst of a lot of this. 

And at last, a call for open, fair and equitable access to scientific resources. This was brought up by many people. There were many talks that somehow touched on this. I just put something from Kevin, the training of African scientists he's been deeply involved. I know others, I know Sonia also does we also do to less extents. This came from Kay’s talk, the importance of those collections and helping those collections be maintained and updated, modernize the curation, and Kyalo talking about digitization, microCT and what decolonizing means. And Dino who told us, “Hey, the genomes are online, but there's not a single computer in Kenya that can actually download them and analyze them”. So we really as a community have to do something about this. And I think it's part attitude, part partnership, part collaboration, but also helping our Kenyan colleagues seek the funds and implement ways in which they can do the science at the same level as anybody else. I'm not sure what comes next. Oh, I was gone, sorry. But in this little end of this story, there's a gap and that's the gap that actually we are working in. So I thought that I will use the remaining time very fast to tell you a little bit what we've been doing. Before I go there, I'm going to tell you a little bit about Richard. So I met Richard not that long ago, 20 years ago here at Stony Brook in 2004. 

It was a fabulous conference. I was looking at the pictures last night. Gosh, we were young, we had a lot of fun. And we met again here at Stony Brook in 2005. 

And that year Richard said, come work in Turkana. And we said, we're just closing a project. I had a project in India at the time and we were just closing a project in the Solomon Islands you don't want to know. I said, no, I'm sorry, I can't. But then I asked him, would you come and open our new research institute, which he did in May, 2006 without telling us that actually he was so very ill was only he left the hospital to come and open this building. Went from this back to the hospital and a few days later he had a kidney transplant. 

Then we met again later that same year. He's obviously better. We had another meeting and I found this picture of Richard with Philip Tobias. I thought, God, we've got to share that. Also, memories of Bill Younger and Bill Kimbel who were at that meeting on this occasion. Richard said, huh, come work in Turkana. And I said, no, we can't. We finished; we finished the Solomon Islands thanks God. I'm sort of finishing India, but we just put in a big grant for Libya. I said, sorry, there is no way. So then early 2007, Richard comes to Cambridge to get an honorary doctorate and wears silly hats, laugh with the Duke. I met his brother Colin, which was a shock. It was like seeing Louis Leakey walk into the room and I thought, oh my God. And then we also met John Doe and his wife, which was an amazing occasion. 

So that evening at dinner Richard says, “Oh, I need you to do me a favor”. I said, “What is that? You came sick to open the center I'm not going to say no, right?” He said, “Well, could you come to Kenya because I have a guest whose language is in Spanish, and I'm slightly concerned. Would you please come?” And I said, “Yes, of course”. Okay. So that was my first trip to Turkana. My first, sorry. Oh, where am I? My first flight in a helicopter, my first flight with Louise on a small plane and seeing the lake from the air. I had met Meave at Stony Brook, but we had never properly chatted. So, it was the discovery of Meave I wish we could remember what we were laughing at. So no, we had such a great time. And then Richard, there was this helicopter floating about because of his guest, and Richard said, “Oh Meave, why don't you and Marta go in this helicopter and visit places?” Which we did. It was extraordinary. We could choose anywhere. We flew everywhere. It was extraordinary. And I found my first fossil. I found a little mandible, I collected it, all the fragments, and Meave said, “He'll kill you”. 

So that evening I had my first row with Richard of many, and then he accused me to plotting with Meave because she was protecting me and helping and say, let her with her mandible. Anyway, so then Richard's answer to this plot, leads to say “You're missing a tooth”. Anyway, so then he said, we'll go back by helicopter. We got on the helicopter with him and Kamoya. He said, “Where is that mandible? You'll find that tooth”. Well thank you anyway, which we did actually, we crawled the place and found the tooth. But in that helicopter ride, we also hovered over this place. And he said, “Do you have that machine of yours? him and the GPS, I said, “Yes”, “Can you take these points? Because here I'm going to build TBI”, which was extraordinary. And the following year, no. And then of course, wait, let me just say another thing. 

Naive as I was an I am and you realize the whole thing was a plot, right? The guest who spoke perfectly good English, so there was no Spanish situation in this case, right? But he said, well, which day are you coming back? I said, oh, okay, next year. Anyway, but next year TBI was happening. The buildings were going up and everything was going. And Richard asked Kamoya to take us back to this place of the mandible. And because I had said, I've never done this before, I said, Kamoya, we'll show you. So Rob and I went for a season with Kamoya, a short season to figure out how to work in Turkana. And since then we've had a number of projects. And I want to tell you super-fast, a little bit, very fast, what we have been doing. So, this place is down there, this is a large lake, is a high lake level rendition of Lake Turkana. So you can see up there where it meets the (???) system up near up there. And we work in this area which has these other very large floodplain. And the reason I put it full, we always show it at current lake level, is that anything we find is a snapshot in time when the lake was high. So, we really have no insight of who was there or what was happening when the lake was low. 

So what have we found? So imagine, can I go back one? So that tip there, sticking out there is Lothagam, right? So, the area where we work in is about 20 kilometers south of Lothagam, more or less. And if you think Lothagam is up there, and this is the area, this is where we've been working most of the time for the last nearly three years. We're also working east of the Kerio. I'm not going to talk today about that. It's a fascinating place another time. So, on this west Kerio plane, we have a series of sites. The vast majority are African humid period sites. The African humid period covers everything. So if you note in white is African humid period, up here at 452 meters above sea level, there's an African humid period layer, huge. You see all those huge shell mountains that you see south of Lothagam, which means that everything was at one point, at least covered by the lake in the last 10,000 years. So lake, the deposits from this last lake are everywhere and they have become both a distraction sort of interest and a nightmare because they're literally everywhere. We cannot ignore it while we're trying to work on the older things, but also because we have a very nice relationship with the local communities and the local chiefs who thinks these skeletons are the coolest thing. So they come and say, ah, Dr. Marta, Dr. Rob, there's another skeleton there that needs looking after. 

It's four days, five days digging of three, four people for one skeleton when you're working on something else. So it's a form also salvage archeology that we have to sort of factor in all we do. But we also have a few upper Pleistocene sites, a number of mid late Pleistocene localities, early middle Pleistocene localities, earliest Pleistocene localities, and early Pliocene localities across the Kerio. So let me tell you a little bit, two slides of the Holocene. So the African humid period, which we have modeled, we have, I don't a hundred radiocarbon dates and we've modeled the ups and downs of the lake. And you can see in the sediments, you can see the shell, the beach layers and the beaches are just choke full of material. I mean it's just a density, unbelievable and then gullies cut them and they just washed out. And in there, strangely enough, humans are about a third. 

I know there's a bias in what we collect and what we record so we don't record fish. I'm sure if we had the fish there, these proportions would change. The fish is the floor, right? So fish is just a constant element, but it's more just about the same number of people as hippopotamus, which is pretty strange. I should also say that these are not archeological sites, it's just a landscape. There's nothing to it so the people are there dead with everything else. Most of them are fragments of elements, not whole skeletons. I think there's 1200 something fragments of people every element present. It's an amazing collection actually. The paleodelta of the Kerio, the people are quite different, more robust than the ones on the lacustrine edge. The paleodelta also has funny fauna, has rhinos, has a strange pig. Thure tells me that the bush pigs have the wrong isotope value, has a strange crocodile so fascinating aspects of a fauna that's only 10,000 years old. 

We know that we're fishing, or we think that we're fishing because we found over 700 barbed bone harpoons. So part of the problem is describing this is taking us years and years and years and years, but we're getting there. And with Lawrence, we're talking about monographs coming out of this. Anyway, so just a little bit about the people. Like I said, it's in the hundreds. This is this lovely girl in there she remembers. I told her, please, can you click anyway? And these people, like I said, are super interesting. And besides the morphology, they have these occurrence of violence. So we publish one case, the Nataruk, which is a group of skeletons in semi-proximity that have clear evidence of violence included embedded lithics but there are others. We have a number of other isolated cases of obsidian in the spine, smashed head, a blunt force trauma on a pelvis, a sharp trauma on the other pelvis, there’s a lot.

And then again, thoughts of Curtis and his argument about warfare with greater sedentism, with greater predictable resources and then that you have to actually fight for and control those territories. It's interesting, and we were talking within Ndiema, all the embedded weapons we found, and that Robins found in that foot in Lothagam many years ago are obsidian. And we have virtually no obsidian there. So, we're talking with Emmanuel about being able to trace that obsidian. Okay, abandon the Holocene. So, a little quick look at the three of the upper Pleistocene sites. They're of different ages. So, the site of Ngingolea, as you see is featureless. There's nothing. It's just a flat piece of desert but on the surface, there were bits of this skull, a floor of MSA, and then the excavations revealed more. The skull is interesting, is a modern human, but it's a very large, robust modern human that we're finishing the publication now. And these are put for Curtis because we talked the other day. So, the MSA is a very nice MSA mostly on phonolite, but it has lupemban points and then it has, this is strange little cores the volumetric cores with a top made of a disc core. And in some cases where the tip may have been used, it's very strange. There are many, many, many of them. 

There's a site called Lomanimania, which is a knapping event so from this site we can refit all the pieces. They go deep, a meter and a half, two meters in the trench, and again these phonolite lovely pieces. Then there's the site of Longa’arakak, which we actually have not studied very much. We were there for three, four days. It has very nice fauna covered in MSA in the trenches. The trenches were really for the animals rather than the MSA, but I put it here because that's the site with the elephant that Thure mentioned. So the one that he's excited about the isotopes. So then moving onto the middle Pleistocene. 

Our biggest issue is dating these sites. So, most of our dates are uranium series dates. We now have in Paris; they're doing the uranium series with ESR. We have a couple of OSLs for the younger sequence, however, where is Marine? She left. Okay, but Marine is coming in February, and she will sample them all, which is fabulous. Okay, so how these sites, again, if you look featureless, virtually featureless and they're made of tilted sandstones and in between the parallel tilted sandstones that these infills, these infills have these horizontal floors of stromatolites. So what these stromatolites are telling us that there was a quiet, gentle, stable water of about a meter high on top. So, we can say that the middle Pleistocene actually had the same high lake level regime as we see until today. And this has implications in our depiction of the shape of the Basin in the last million years, which is one of the question marks. 

This is stromatolite besides being very beautiful, sometimes they form floors connected one to the other. I mean they're quite extraordinary. They're also full of fossils inside. So one of the things we are working with two teams, one in Spain, one in France, is if we can date the fossils, we can then date the stromatolites. And the stromatolites are a major stratigraphic marker here. So we believe there are three layers of stromatolites. This is the one that Rob showed that has the entire Elephas tooth, recki tooth inside but this that's a set of carnival they're lovely. From the group of sites that is lateish middle Pleistocene, they're interesting, they're different.

We have two elements of extinct animals there, Metridiochoerus is still there. So, if we think this site, the dates we have is 250- 300 and we also have gorgops there. Otherwise the rest of the fauna is more or less current fauna. We have some hominins, I put two here. One because it's this huge humerus and also these two parietals, we now found the other half of that other parietal. And this is a squat set of parietals, broad and squat. They're complete. So it's not a modern human head. The other images come from the older set of sites, including the one that we have now a date of 750. And that's a different world in terms of the fauna. There are actually six pigs there, we have three different crocodiles, whole skeletons. I mean it's fabulous, giant turtles, et cetera. I mean it's a very, very rich fauna. And we have a series of hominins that we are currently working on the description in particular that small hominin head which John has already seen some time ago. It's the size of Homo naledi so just drop in that there. 

Okay, so we think that actually this gap can be filled, and I am sure that this is not the only place in the Basin where these sediments exist; they're different. Rob always says, “God and other people working in the Plio-Pleistocene, they have a hundred meters of sediment. We're lucky if we have two”. Most of the sediment is a meter or less. So, it's a very different depositional landscape, partly because I imagine everything's been washed away by recurrent lakes transgressions but they're there. And we're talking again with Marine when we went with Louise and Meave to Ileret, look for the Guam site, we found the Guam site. And that needs actually a good trench, Marine will do the good OSLs we were discussing this week. And because there are other middle Pleistocene sites and I think it's critical that we explore them, why? We know that more or less the age, and John, I'm ignoring all the introgression lines, okay? So, picture this with lines crossing everywhere, okay. So, as a sort of structure, we know that somewhere between 200 and 300,000 is what the genetics tell us we have the last common ancestor of modern humans. 

That must have split from another population in Africa. We also know that between 400 and 500 we have the last common ancestor of Denisovans and Neanderthals. We also know that the separations of the sapiens lineage and the Neanderthal, Denisovan lineage is somewhere between 750 and 550,000. 

So, these are long space of time between these events, but also a constant focus on this age number one. Number one is the age of the last common ancestor of people who are alive today. The moment we have those African nation genomes, the date will be older. So we have a lineage that is in fact probably 700,000 years old. And then at some point our lineage has to split from another, sorry. So, that drove me to think we're looking also, I mean there are two different things to be looked at. One is the middle Pleistocene because who's there? I mean is the ancestors of modern humans are there and possibly the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans are there. 

But also, we have to look further back in time to understand what is creating the origin of that encephalized lineage. And what is interesting, so this is adapted, I adapted this from a paper by Grant et al., 2017 and they created an aridity index (three minutes). And this aridity index is important because in the tropics, the impact of the climate change is so different. So, what you're seeing here, they have 3 million, I put here the last 1.2 is this massive dry episode, which is actually when Olorgesailie was dry, right? One of the very few other records we have, but also these wet episodes and in green, are the presumed Green Sahara also looking at sapropels where dispersals could happen, and population expansions could happen. So how does that affect our thinking of this? So that mega drought is just when we are, or the genetics with those huge confidence intervals, let's not forget, are estimating the splitting of those lineages. Well, all that structure probably full of admixture and full of introgression is happening in periods where there's much more persistent wet episodes. And of that time we know nothing. (So, three). 

So what can we say for the period before the lineage of modern humans, our knowledge is minimal. We have this set of fossils, Daka, Buia, were completely different from the other, Eritrea, Ethiopia. We have the Olorgesailie frontal, which is smaller than the one that we found and is in fact smaller than a lady, and we have this massive mandible at Tighenif 3. So we do have at the moment any idea of the ancestors to our encephalized lineage. Let's look at the other end of the spectrum and say, well, who was around between 400 and 200? So, this Kibish with the wrong date should be 230. Who was around? And there's all sorts of people around, but this naledi, Florisbad, Kabwe, Irhoud, Eliye Springs from Turkana, Ndutu, they're all around there and the diversity is huge, but we don't know who they are. So, looking at the case of the Turkana hominins that we are finding, my guess is that they contribute to different bits of this lineage, including this that I think existed. And I think Lee and his collaborators are showing us so clearly a small brain African Homo lineage of longstanding of which we have more than one candidate. So I need to rush. Okay, actually I'll leave it. 

Will the girl remember? Okay, I want to stop or end with my last slide before acknowledgement. It didn't work. Okay, so those are our sites. 

It's a drop in the ocean. It has taken us 16 years trying to figure out the dates, figure out what's happening, and it's a drop in the ocean. We cannot address our big questions as long as we have this tiny representation in space and time and that matters. The problem is that we are in a risk averse moment in funding. So young people tell me, they say, “I want to go to that place in the Congo and I want to go to that place in Zambia, et cetera”. They do not get the funding. But I think that people who get big projects, I've been lucky, I've got several big projects, we can sponsor that exploration, we can partner with that exploration, but without it, we can keep on finding fossils and describing them and we will not answer any questions. Okay, acknowledgements. Alicia? I couldn't find a picture. 

Sorry. Okay, my first thanks are obviously TBI, Stony Brook, National Geographic, but Lawrence and Fred who put this conference together and Alicia who made it happen. I think this conference is very, very special. My next thanks is to TBI itself, those of us who spent part of our life there we love it. We just love the place, love the buildings, love coming out of the field to those beautiful showers and hot breakfast like Kevin was saying, but also arriving and finding that Kevin took the tonic for your gin and tonic or that other person has just been or delaying your flight a day so that you just cross with somebody and have a chat and share what you found. So TBI is super special. I want to thank the National Museums of Kenya and our two colleagues from there who are here today for the passion facing strong adversity in many situations with which they keep the collections that we all love and study. And a special mention to Tom who is just fantastic and he's just reboxed and relined the entire Hominin room. He did it through Covid on his own. He went to work every day. We talked on Zoom occasionally. Should I cut it this way? Should I cut it that way? And he reboxed, relined, reformed the entirety of the hominins. Finally, thank the people of Turkana who welcome us every year. 

Thank Richard and Meave for everything they've done and all the inspiration. And thank Rob.

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