About the Turkana Boy

I leave for Nairobi in 12 days, so it is about time to start posting. I will also post while there teaching my class on “The Law and Literature of Colonialism and Post-Colonialism.”  In putting together my list of things to do outside the classroom the first thing that came to mind wasn’t the safari or the Indian Ocean beaches to the south of Mombasa, but a visit to the Nairobi National Museum to the KNM-WT 1500, otherwise known as “The Turkana Boy.”  The Turkana Boy is a youthful Homo erectus (or a Homo ergaster, depending on who is doing the naming) discovered near Lake Turkana, Kenya by Kamoya Kimeau and Richard Leakey of the famous family of anthropologists in 1984.
At a mere 1.6 million years old, the Turkana Boy is the youngest of the three “name” skeletons for in East Africa.  “Lucy” comes in at about 3.2 million years old and hails from the Afar Depression, to the north in Ethiopia. So-named because “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was being played on the camp tape recorder as Lucy was uncovered, Lucy was an Australopithecus afarensis discovered in 1974.
Older still is “Ardi”  who was actually discovered in 1994 but not revealed to the public until 2009. Ardi is a 4.4 million year old Ardipithecus ramidius, also from Ethiopia.
The questions of how these three fit into the human family tree and whether East Africa was indeed the cradle of modern Homo is endlessly debated and the human family line changes frequently, so I can’t say whether the Turkana Boy is a relative or not, but I know I will find it fascinating to see this exhibit.  I expect a reaction akin to what I felt when I first saw “The Venus of Willendorf” in Austria. Just 4.3 inches tall, the 22,000 to 24,000 year old statue is beautifully presented in the Naturhistoriches Museum in Vienna. Ever since seeing the dinosaurs in Philadelphia’s The Academy of Natural Sciences and picking up some toy “cavemen” (I too thought they played with dinosaurs at that point, although some of grow out of that notion) I have found the subject fascinating. Not sure how I ended up as a lawyer instead of an anthropologist.  I will let you know from Nairobi how it goes.