Dino J. Martins

An overview of research in the Turkana Basin: Past, present & future

Dr. Richard Leakey's vision for science grew from the pioneering work in Turkana to engage with and address questions about our origins, survival and future. This talk will cover some of the big questions and debates through time and the growing research in the Turkana Basin.

FULL TRANSCRIPT 

Good afternoon everyone, and it's, I know it's that time in the afternoon when the sort of jet lag for some of us is setting in. So I will try and keep it energetic and really focused here. This is a beautiful view. Many of you will recognize this is Central Island and it's an island right in the middle of Lake Turkana. It was one of my dreams to go there, and it was actually Richard who enabled me to be able to get to Central Island. And it's not just an island. Within the island are three lakes. So you have these island ecosystems within a lake, within this island. It is just a remarkable, remarkable part of what are the riches of northern Kenya And on Central Island, we've gone lots of times. We've taken the field school there. It's really interesting right now. So the three lakes, one of the lakes with the lake level rising has rejoined the main lake. 

But before it did that these lakes had been isolated for quite some periods of time. They're filled with incredible insect and fish and bird and plant species. And today I'm going to give you a sort of very broad overview of what has happened at TBI, where things are going. And I'm not going to talk about fossils, so I'm going to just very briefly mention that you'll be hearing about all the wonderful fossils from all these amazing speakers, both today as well as over the rest of this week. But I do want to point out that one of the reasons TBI was established was to enable the research in the Turkana basin in this part of Kenya. Richard was very, very keen that researchers come to Turkana. And as you've seen from the wonderful history that Bernard presented us coming to Turkana, making those discoveries has given so much to the world. 

When we think of great scientists, I always think what brought people to science? What makes them wonderful communicators? Why would you dedicate your life to going to places that were distant and difficult and hot and remote? And I do believe Richard stands with the greatest of scientists and was a great friend and mentor to many of us. But here are three great scientists. We have Huxley, Darwin, and Richard. And if I think about what unites them and unites many of our scientists, I believe you'll agree with me. It's a sense of wonder, this deep curiosity about the world and bringing to it this childlike questioning that allows us to really ask deep questions about where we come from, who we are and where we are going. And the other sort of interesting comparison I wanted to make here, for those of you who are in the sciences, you will understand this, but more broadly is that in a way, Richard manifested both the characteristics of Darwin, the dedicated naturalist, a deep, deep eye for detail, long, long hours of very intense work in the field, as well as being very connected with lots of people, incredible correspondence. 

And Huxley who was known as Darwin's Bulldog, was also manifested in Richard's character in that he was also willing to take on a fight to be controversial, to engage in these big questions, to debate and to move science forward. And thanks to that both visionary nature, that attention to detail, that willingness to bring people into the field, the willingness to invest in young people and look at the incredible, incredible legacy of knowledge that we stand on. Knowledge from East Africa, from the African continent and from the Turkana Basin. And we'll be hearing from many of the authors, the scientists, the leaders who've put this incredible work together, the hominids, the archeology over this week. But I'm going to tell you just a little bit about TBI and then some of the directions we are going. And I do have three slides of insects, so you'll have to bear with me on that. 

So TBI has now been in existence for 15 years. In 15 years we've had some wonderful milestones. Over 200 scientists have actively come and done research in the Turkana Basin. They've produced over 250 publications. Fred said I have 40 publications, actually I have 84, so I probably need to update something online, but I have those publications. Actually, one of my first publications was thanks to Richard, Richard encouraging me at the museum in Nairobi where many of us young scientists had our start in East Africa to go into science to be a naturalist that this could actually give you a future in the world. But something very important that Richard did as he brought the genesis of TBI to Turkana, is that we engage with our communities. And I'll talk a little bit later about some of the community engagement in science, but we know Turkana is one of the more marginal deprived areas of Kenya. 

But Richard saw it as one of the richest areas of Kenya, and it was the richest part of Kenya because Turkana is actually the place where all humanity can trace its origin. And in engaging with the community, we must always remember that as we collect fossils, as we do science, as we interact in that landscape, we are hosted by the people of Turkana. We don't own that land. We are actually guests there. And by being a good guest and a good partner and a good friend to the community, that is a really critical part of what TBI does and will continue to do. 

This is a site that is on the eastern side of Turkana. Some of you will recognize it. And what you see on the ground here are not rocks, but they're actually stromatolites. And if we think about the past of Turkana, stromatolites are these remarkable formations that are made by ancient organisms that actually some of them go back billions of years. So, Turkana has a fossil record that we are very interested in the hominids, which is very important, but it is actually stretching much deeper in time. And one of Richard's big dreams was that we will ask the question about ourselves, but because we are just one species amongst millions, that we are this one speck in this bigger universe that we will also have the humility and the sense of wonder to ask questions about other things and other spaces and other species. 

So I said I would have only three slides. This is the first one on butterflies. Richard actually spent some of his youth collecting butterflies, and we have some of those specimens in the national museum and in collections around the world. This was published a couple of weeks ago, 87 authors from 24 different countries. And I challenge the paleoanthropologists to have a paper with 87 authors from that many countries. When I started at TBI, Lee will, may remember this. So we had an early human evolution workshop and Lee was invited. And Richard's instructions to me was that if anybody physically attacked Lee that I would actually protect, I would stand up and protect him because the tension around the debate in human origins and some of the things that were going on at that time was very palpable to the point where several of the scientists refused to join us for dinner, which was and sulked in their rooms, which as you know, that also was very rude to Richard because sitting down and eating together was one of those very important things that we all did. 

Anyway, back to the butterflies. This paper took us over seven years to do and really a huge thanks to TBI investing in me as a postdoc and the broader support I've had. And it's very interesting. So butterflies obviously much older in origin, but they originate in the Americas and Africa is the sort of more recent continent they get to, whereas of course, hominids humans went in the other direction. But the fascinating thing with this butterfly diversity is that the drying out of Africa, we have some other work we are doing on another group showing that drying out makes a very unique adaptation. And so this brings me to the next sort of big horizon. In addition to looking at the broader diversity of life and its evolution, we must think and look to Turkana as both a place of our origin, but also a place that can offer some real insights into our future. 

Turkana County and Marsabit County are the two biggest counties in Kenya by land area. It's also a part of the world that has some of the highest on average temperatures year round. And yet as we know, it has been inhabited by people, modern people for a long period of time, and the Turkana community have very much established in that landscape. So what can we look at in this landscape today that both will bring lessons from the past as well as look to lessons in the future? So one of the projects that I'm very privileged to be part of is the Turkana Genome project, and the leaders of the project are here. I believe Professor Julien Ayroles is somewhere here. Oh, there he is. Amanda Lea and Dr. Joseph Kamau. This started from a visit that Julien made to see me while I was in Turkana as a postdoc. 

And it has now grown into this large international project. We had the pleasure of hosting some of you at one of our community events. Now, one of the critical things in doing this kind of science is having a very strong and respectful relationship with local communities to ask these questions. It's really important that we acknowledge where science has come from imperfect in some places, and that as we take it forward, we really look and answer and explore these questions and that everyone becomes a co-producer of that knowledge that everyone has a right and a responsibility and an ability to contribute to the knowledge. So, the whole idea of this project came from me taking Julien for a walk across to the Napudet Hills, which they're very hot and we met some women carrying water. And I explained to Julien that that water they were carrying was the water that would serve them for the whole week. 

And Julien was like, that can't be. How can someone survive on such little water in such a hot and harsh landscape? And the answer is of course, yes, people do survive because it is a very difficult place and it's a very deprived place in some ways in terms of access to certain resources. But it's also an interesting area to ask some of these questions about human adaptation and the big part of human evolution going forward, because we know where we've come from in Africa, but we are changing our lifestyle, we're changing our environment, the climate is changing around us and how are we going to be part of that? How do these questions of our past and our current behavior connect or disconnect? And the idea of the evolutionary mismatch, this is a wonderful place that we can ask these questions because we can look at pastoralist lifestyles and we can compare them to people that have shifted away from pastoralism that are living in urban areas. 

And we are making some really, really interesting discoveries there. Now the other really important area of science that we need to grow in Turkana is the applied science. We are asking very deep basic questions, but we need to connect with all the other sciences that are important to the landscape that we are part of. And the landscape in Turkana is a pastoralist landscape. We all know that those who've been there. And one of the species that is up in Turkana is the camel. And Richard would always tell stories about camels, about how irascible they were and that they were amongst the most mean animals. I have a slightly different take on camels. Camels are actually incredibly emotional and they're very sweet animals. If you treat them nicely, they actually really, they greet you. They greet by giving camel kisses and they come up and they sniff you. 

And many of the people living in parts of northern Kenya actually living, have lived with camels for thousands of years. We will hear this week about pastoralism, we'll hear about interactions with animals in the fossil record, but just like many parts of the world are changing, so is northern Kenya. So, this is one of the studies that has been led by one of my Kenyan students, and we know that one of the biggest challenges in the world today is health. And one of the real looming threats apart from the pandemic and viruses is something called antimicrobial resistance. We are running out of antibiotics to treat very basic diseases and without antibiotics, quite frankly, none of the western researchers who've gone to Turkana would've been able to survive. We would've lost probably 90% of them or more. We even just had a scientist the other day who without antibiotics would've been in quite a pickle. 

But what's happening in these landscapes is interesting. We are seeing the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria in this case E. coli in camels. And so what is happening, what is happening in this landscape that's changing, that is allowing something, a part of the world we wouldn't imagine should have much antibiotic resistance. Really it's because of the things we are doing. We are changing the ecology, we are changing how animals are kept. We're using and misusing antibiotics in veterinary medicine. And we need to understand this because this is a very important part of how we adapt and how we go forward and how we continue to produce livestock and sustain these landscapes. Northern Kenya has been in a drought across the horn of Africa for the last three years. We've had five failed rainy seasons, but one of the few species that has continued to survive and produce through the drought has been the camel. 

And so we also look now to the camel as a species for the future, the number of livestock around the world. We all know the issues with livestock, but camel numbers in the horn of Africa have actually stayed stable despite the drought where some 70 to 80% of other livestock have died. So it's another important species that we will continue to look at. Sorry, I told you there'd be a couple more insect slides. So here's something that happened in 2020 and when it started happening, I called Richard and we spoke very, very excited about this. So this is a swarm of the desert locust, and for over 60 years, they had not been seen in northern Kenya. And then on the very last day of December, 2019, they crossed over swarm, crossed over from Somalia into Kenya, and that swarm actually originated in Yemen and what had happened, why these swarms reappeared. 

Well, there'd been this Indian ocean dipole that produced a cyclone that put all this rain into these environments in the north that are normally very dry, very arid, and had flipped a switch and turned on the locusts. So I call Richard and we were talking, we were so, so excited by the locusts, everyone else was horrified by them and government started spraying them and we were watching the swarms and one of the really deep questions that we were asking is, does the swarm actually have a collective mind? How does it behave and move? And it does. The swarms were doing some remarkable things. They were not simply just being blown about the place, the swarms as a single entity were responding to the environment, responding even to being sprayed, responding to many of these different things that were happening in this landscape. Anyway, between the spraying and all the response and then with Covid appearing a couple of months later, we weren't able to answer the question on the collective mind of the swarm. 

But I was determined not to lose the opportunity to do something scientifically with this remarkable phenomenon. And what we were able to do was to catch the locusts and then get them into liquid nitrogen. You can imagine there's a pandemic taking place. There's all this other chaos and get them to the US Department of Agriculture and sequence the genome of the desert locust. And the amazing thing, we are still early days on this, but the desert locust genome is three times the size of the human genome. So what is going on? Why is it that an insect that's just that big has a genome that is so large? Is it related to how it behaves it's biology? And I think the wonderful thing is that Richard could see how exciting that was. When we talked it wasn't about this being a disaster, it was about this being a scientific opportunity. And so we'll continue doing that. The other thing that was fun to be involved in is, and I'll tell you another little story about Richard is, so that's a mature locust. They turn yellow when they're mature. Those are the immature as the last stage, the pinkish ones, they were just landing. And you can see due to the Jack Russell, very excited, she feasted on locusts a lot. 

Dogs and me have a very close history as do dogs in all humans. But Richard was always very indulgent of us with the dogs. But he would pretend that he didn't like them because he said that when they would go camping as children, the dogs and his parents would sleep in the car or on the bed and the kids had to sleep on the ground. especially he said, I don't like little black and white dogs. And so I thought, gosh, is this going to be a problem? Because guess what, I've always had Jack Russell Terriers. But that was actually Richard's way of actually saying that he really did like them and he really indulged the dogs. Although the dogs in Turkana, when they would do something naughty, I would always be told, control your dogs. Make sure you are looking after them. And they're not causing problems eating goats and causing other issues. 

In this case, Dudu did not try and eat a goat, but she did very much enjoy eating the locusts. So we decided we won't lose this opportunity and we'll turn the locust into animal feed, which we were able to do successfully in a pilot project. And if we think about that biomass of insects and the challenge we have in many parts of the world with access to protein, that will be a great future way of looking at things. So my third slide on thinking about the future, the other thing that Richard really allowed me to do in Turkana, which has still really producing so much science is that we looked at the bees. And now the other, Richard was, when I first started looking at bees, he informed me that he was allergic to bee stings. And I said, well, I'm looking at bees in a much broader sense, not just honeybees, which are social ones that sting. 

Some of the bees are stingless bees, and of course the solitary bees, you don't really have to worry about them stinging you. So then he was like, okay, well then I suppose that'll be okay. I also wanted to protect all the wasp nests on the campus and also being allergic to those. The wasps nest would get removed every time they built new nest. And while I was doing the study on wasps, very graciously, the wasps were spared, and I was able to study the wasps with the students. By Richard allowing me to go to Turkana and look at bees. We've made some amazing discoveries. We've described new species Samba Turkana over up here, new genus of parasitic bees. And I just had a student sorting through the bee collection where up to 700 morphospecies from one site in Turkana. So, Turkana is also this incredibly diverse part of the world for bees, and it comes back to this bigger story of evolution. 

Bees, it seems like it hot and dry. So the very dry areas of the world have more diversity of bees, unlike most of the groups of insects that in plants and everything we know about. But this remarkable diversity of bees is really interesting because we see one particular group of bees that are diverse in Turkana and northern Kenya are the most basal lineage of all the bees. So, butterflies have an origin in the Americas, we're still working on this, but it looks like bees have an origin in what would've been Gondwana and the part of Gondwana that is today, the Horn of Africa. 

So, the last thing here that I just wanted to talk about was where is TBI going coming up to a year in the role in Kenya? And something that Richard really, really cared about was that we broaden and deepen and engage more substantially in who is a scientist who gets to be a scientist. Here are Pauline, Linet and Evelyn, who are three of the Kenyan students that have participated in the field schools that have done some of their research at TBI. All three of them are now headed into further education into international universities where they've been admitted and become part of that as a result of the science foundation, they're having at TBI all are going to do science within the basin. And that I think for me is one of the most important legacies that Richard asks us to honor. 

That we will really bring the science that is about all of us, all our origin, and we will also include people from the continent in that opportunity. Because what we know within the continent is there is no shortage of talent, there's no shortage of passion and energy and ideas, but it has been a bit challenging to have opportunities matched with that by having TBI be where it is in these two remote parts of northern Kenya that allows that science to not just build knowledge, but also to build it in a way that gives opportunities to both Kenyans and to East Africans and to people from across the continent to be part of the science. And when the science is done that way, the science is much deeper and more meaningful and much broader. So my last point here will be if we are honoring Richard and we're going to hear about this remarkable scientific legacy over this week, let us also think about how we are training and empowering and including the next generation and really broadening who gets to be called a scientist. Thank you.

View All Richard Leakey Tribute videos