Evolution & life

The Turkana Boy skeleton is found

1984

In 1984 Kamoya Kimeu, the head of the Leakey team's fossil-hunting crew, found a piece of skull at Nariokotome on the west side of Lake Turkana in Kenya, and the excavation by Richard Leakey and Alan Walker unearthed an almost complete skeleton of a boy who lived about 1.6 million years ago. The Turkana Boy, a Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, was about eight to twelve years old and already 1.6 metres tall, and would have been over 1.8 metres tall as an adult. His long legs and narrow hips show a body like ours, adapted to walking and running long distances, though his brain was only two-thirds the size of ours.

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