Elite Traveler March-April 2016

93 elite traveler MAR/APR 2016

View from the helicopter of the shores of Lake Turkana

Homo erectus (1.9 million years old), the almost complete skeleton of the Turkana Boy (1.6 million years old), and the oldest known Homo sapiens (195,000 years old). Louise, Richard’s daughter, knows the basin as well as anyone. As a baby she sat in a tub of water to keep cool while her parents excavated its fossil beds. By 12 she was driving their Land Rover around the parched terrain. At 21 she took charge of their research program when her father lost his legs in a plane crash and her mother accompanied him to London for protracted medical treatment. Now 43, lean, fit and married to Emmanuel de Merode, the Belgian prince who runs Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr Leakey has an irresistible enthusiasm for her subject. From the Turkwel research center, she drives us several miles to a patch of barren hillocks. She shows us the casts of ancient reeds. This was once the marshy edge of a lake or river, she says, and fossils show elephants, hippopotami and crocodiles once lived here. So, rather dangerously, did at least two species of hominins. She knows that because her field workers have found their teeth. At the foot of one hillock they spotted “four socking great molars” – each nearly an inch across. On another they found some smaller, more pointed teeth. They were unlike any teeth found before, Dr Leakey says with some excitement, and could conceivably belong to previously unknown species. She takes us to another site where her fossil searchers discovered 10 ancient stone circles. This is where our ancestors buried their leaders 10,000 years ago, and from some of the circles skeletons, figurines, beads and pottery have already been

Dr Louise Leakey shows various fossilized skulls that have been found in the area over the past four decades