THE CHILD OF TURKANA:

 THE CHILD OF TURKANA:

THE CHILD OF TURKANA: The amazing discovery about the origin of humanity

This is the most complete fossil ever discovered; its bones sank into the sediments of that lake and preserved for 1.5 million years.

He was, and is, the most complete fossil of the first humans discovered.

An astonishing discovery shocked the world in 1984, when researchers found the bone remains of an approximately eight-year-old boy in Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.

At that time, the most impactful thing was the preservation of his physical structure. The well-known "Turkana child" is considered the most complete Homo ergaster fossil discovered: it only needed hands and feet.

This little boy's cause of death was septicemia caused by a dental infection. This is how the technical sheet records the different characteristics of the Turkana boy, male by the shape of the pelvis, with extremely long femurs, and the age could be established because they were not yet fully formed.

The Turkana boy also known as the Nariokotome boy is a fossil skeleton in very good condition of conservation that is almost complete and answers to a young man who died between 11 and 12 years ago over 1.5 million years. However, this child is just one of the many fossils of these humans discovered near the lake, which has become an iconic place.

It was there where the celebrated paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey made important findings of fossil hominids. One of them, christened as Homo rudolfensis, is over two million years old and was found in 1972.

Lake Turkana is located in a desert environment, has a surface area of 6405 km2 and is known as the most alkaline in the world. The geological features of its environment are predominantly volcanic and lions, cheetahs and giraffes, among other mammal species, currently live there. Around, there are three national parks of Kenya, considered UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997.