Course I: ANT 304 / ANT 504 – Ecology of the Turkana Basin (Mpala Research Centre & TBI, Ileret)
Dr. Martins’ current scientific research is focused on the evolution and ecology of interactions between insects and plants. He looks at what drives cooperation between insects and plants mainly between flowers and their pollinators as well as between ants and plants. Dr. Martins’ current research includes work with farmers in relation to bees and pesticides and improving pollinator awareness and conservation, general studies of bee evolution and ecology in East Africa, hawkmoth and butterfly pollination, co-evolution and the links between biodiversity and landscape-level processes. He has also begun working on the biology vectors and adaptation to climate and environmental changes in the Turkana Basin.
Dr. Martins has published widely in scientific, natural history, and environmental magazines including: the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, the International Journal of Tropical Insect Science, Nature East Africa, the East Africa Natural History Society Bulletin, Swara, Nature Net, Ecoforum, and the Journal of the East African Wildlife Society. His work has been featured in the Smithsonian magazine, the Guardian, TED, the BBC as well as in National Geographic.
Amongst his awards and fellowships are the Ashford Fellowship in the Natural Sciences, GSAS, Harvard University, a Smithsonian Institution SIWC – MRC Fellowship (2004), and 2002 & 2003 Peter Jenkins Award for Excellence in African Environmental Journalism. In 2009 he won the Whitley Award, for his work on pollinators in East Africa. He was named one of National Geographic’s ‘Emerging Explorers’ in 2011. Dr Martins was recently elected as a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and an honorary life member of the Kenya Horticultural Society. Earlier this year he was awarded the Whitley Gold Award by HRH Princess Anne in London in recognition for his on-going work on the conservation of pollinators and work in public awareness and education on biodiversity.
Course II: GEO 303 / GEO 504 – Geology of the Turkana Basin (TBI, Ileret)
Raynolds’s dissertation research focused on sedimentary rocks that accumulated at the foot of the Himalayas, which led him to study comparable rocks in the Denver Basin that record the uplift of the Front Range. His recent lectures focus on the impact of climate change on Colorado’s ecology and water resources of the Colorado River system.
Course III: ANP 305 / ANT 505 – Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoecology of the Turkana Basin (TBI, Ileret)
Dr. Fortelius has a special interest in plant-eating mammals and their relationship with habitat and climate change. He is particularly fascinated by mammalian teeth, how they form, how they work, how they wear down,
and how their shapes evolve in evolutionary time. His first academic training was in biology, and his teacher in palaeontology was Björn Kurtén, who had a deeply organismic attitude to fossils. He carries with him a conviction that past organisms and ecosystems can only really be understood in relation to the living world. Even more strongly he feels that we cannot hope to understand the living world without sound and detailed knowledge of its stupendously long history. He is somewhat passionate about resolving fossil data geographically and estimating the population sizes as well as the numbers of extinct species.
He started out as a lonesome specialist on fossil rhinoceroses and pigs, but most of my later research has been collaborative. It currently includes seven main areas: deep time palaeoecology and evolution of mammal communities, especially of Eurasia during the last 24 million years; ecometrics of mammalian teeth, especially palaeodiet reconstruction; multidisciplinary fieldwork, most recently in the late Miocene (12 to 5 million years ago) of North China; exploration of modern computational methods for the analysis of large palaeontological datasets (e.g., temporal seriation and analysis of spatial patterns); palaeoclimate reconstruction and modelling; environmental controls on the spatial distribution of modern species and communities; and scaling questions, especially of mammalian teeth and sense organs. He also participates in work on developmental biology and evolution of mammalian teeth.
Since 1992, Dr. Fortelius has been the coordinator of a public database of Neogene Old World Mammals. He is also part of the MorphoBrowser project, a public database of 3D tooth shape.
He makes public appearances where he speaks about evolution, including human origins, for example at the bi-annual Science Forum in Helsinki and recently on Darwin Day in Oslo. He has also participated in the production of educational programmes and documentaries, including Walking with Beasts of the BBC and Discovery Channel.
Among other things he is also a Member of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters as well as the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Chair of the National IUBS Committee of Finland, and Editor (one of many) of Evolutionary Ecology Research.
Dr. Miller is part of a research project known as Origin of Rift Valley Ecosystems (ORVE). Her team works at Buluk, which is an early Miocene (ca. 17-16 Ma) fossil site located in the northeastern part of the Turkana Basin. The Buluk deposits are an extremely rich source of information about the early evolution of many African mammalian groups, including early relatives of elephants, rhinoceroses, carnivores, giraffes, pigs, and primates. Buluk is particularly well-known in paleoanthropology, because the site yields remains of both primitive Old World monkeys and apes, from a time period shortly after the divergence of the two groups but before the appearance of modern lineages. The specific aims of the Buluk project are: 1) to help develop a more complete understanding of the initial phases of Old World monkey and ape emergence; 2) to investigate the transition from archaic to modern African faunas; and 3) to contribute information from Buluk toward a more regional understanding of mammalian and primate evolution.
The occurrence of fossil mammals at Buluk was first reported in the mid-1970’s, and the initial recovery of fossil specimens was published in the mid-1980’s. However, because Buluk is so remote, the logistical supply of long term work in the area was not possible until the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) at Ileret was built. However, now that TBI is in place, plans are underway for additional work in the area, including a summer field school that will allow us to retrieve the important fossil material, while at the same time providing a premier experiential learning opportunity for students.
Course IV: ANP 306 / ANT 506 – Human Evolution in the Turkana Basin (TBI, Ileret)
As a doctoral student at Stony Brook University and a TBI Fellow, Dr. Borths was particularly interested in the Paleogene fauna preserved in the Fayum Depression, Egypt where some of the earliest anthropoid primate fossils have been found. Immersion in the Paleogene gave Dr. Borths insight into the origins of the endemic Africa mammalian fauna that was the ecological starting point for the African fauna that emerged in the Neogene, which is best preserved in East Africa. Now, as an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Borths is working with Dr. Nancy Stevens in the Miocene of eastern Africa, particularly in Kenya and in Tanzania, to identify localities that offer insight into the biological and environmental factors that characterize the Paleogene-Neogene transition in Africa, a transition that shaped the emergence of the earliest hominins.
Dr. Borths is also interested in using fossils and the questions they spark to teach non-specialists about the scientific process. He is the co-creator of Past Time, a project that uses a podcast, blog, social media, and virtual classroom visits to bring fossils and paleontologists to students. He is a scientific advisor for educational publications like Zoobooks, videos through TedEd, and he is part of the advisory board for the Museum of the Environment at Ohio University.
His fieldwork is currently focused in Angola, Antarctica, Alaska, and Mongolia. In the laboratory, his research utilizes advanced imaging and stable isotope techniques to investigate paleoenvironmental, biogeographic, and phylogenetic issues of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras.
Recent field work has taken Kimbel to the Hadar hominid site in Ethiopia, where he has codirected paleoanthropological research since 1990, and to northern Israel, where he has collaborated with Israeli colleagues on the excavation of Middle Paleolithic cave deposits. His lab-oriented interests are in the evolution of hominid skull morphology and function, variation, and systematics and the concept of the species as applied to paleoanthropological problems. Since 1989, Kimbel has been Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on eight National Science Foundation and other research grants totaling $775,000.
Kimbel was Joint Editor of Journal of Human Evolution from 2003-2008.
In the Department of Anthropology (the predecessor to the School of Human Evolution and Social Change), Kimbel served as Director of Graduate Studies from 1999-2003. In 2005, Kimbel was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 2001 Lahr, with co-founder Robert Foley, established the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES) at the University of Cambridge, with funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Leverhulme Trust. The Centre was designed to provide a home for the Duckworth Collection, and up-to-date laboratories and facilities to support research in human evolution which integrated genetics, anthropology, and other fields. Lahr was awarded the Phillip Leverhulme Prize in 2004.
Lahr’s research is in human evolution, and ranges across hominid morphology, prehistory and genetics. Her early work provided a test of the Multiregional Hypothesis of modern human origins, and underlined much of the argument in favour of regional continuity in traits between archaic and modern humans. This research expanded into a fuller consideration of modern human origin and its relationship to human diversity, published as a book in 1996 (The Evolution of Human Diversity). Her subsequent research continued to explore human diversity from a number of different approaches – genetic, ecological and in terms of life history.
She and Robert Foley were among the first to propose a ‘southern route’ for humans out of Africa, and for human diversity to be the product of multiple dispersals as well as local adaptation. She has led field projects in the Amazon, the Solomon Islands, the Central Sahara and Kenya, the last two focusing on issues to do with the origins and dispersals of modern humans in Africa.
Lahr is currently the director of In-Africa, an ERC funded research project examining the role of east Africa in modern human origins and was recently interviewed alongside Richard and Meave Leakey as part of the documentary ‘Bones of Turkana’, a National Geographic Special about palaeoanthropology and human evolution in the Turkana Basin, Kenya.
Fredrick says reading about the new paleontology discoveries by Mary Leakey and her son, Richard Leakey, was very inspiring to him as a young adult. Today, Fredrick works closely with Richard, his wife Meave, and his daughter Louise Leakey at the Turkana Basin Institute.
The budding scientist earned his PhD in paleontology from the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa, before returning home to Kenya.
However, my plans for a surgical career were put on hold in 1972 when I was invited by Richard Leakey to become a member of what later became known as the Koobi Fora Research Project. I was one of three anatomists (Michael Day and Alan Walker were the others) charged with describing the hominin fossils recovered from East Rudolf. The majority of the fossil remains were from the skull and dentition, but for various reasons the three of us would each have preferred to work on the postcranial fossils. Richard Leakey brought us together in his hotel room in New York to try to resolve this impasse, but we all stuck to our guns. Not a little frustrated, Richard went into the bathroom then emerged having broken three matches into different lengths. He told us that the choice of region and/or topic would be decided by the length of the match he then invited us to draw. Mine was the shortest match, so I had no choice but to work on the cranial remains. This task, which involved determining how many taxa were represented among the hominin cranial fossils, led to my interest in patterns of intra- versus interspecific variation. Thus the topic of my PhD (The University of London, 1975) was sexual dimorphism in the skeleton of higher primates (14). Richard Leakey’s act of generosity towards a young scholar proved to be a major influence on my career.
My involvement in the analysis of the fossil hominins from Koobi Fora continued to influence my choice of research topics. Once it became apparent that more than one lineage was being sampled at Koobi Fora, Andrew Chamberlain and I published a cladistic analysis of early hominin phylogeny (62). Several other cladistic analyses followed, including an examination of monophyly in Paranthropus (68), and thus began an interest in the role of homoplasy in hominin evolution.
Course V: ANT 307 / ANT 507 – Archaeology of the Turkana Basin (TBI, Turkwel)
Professor Brooks is actively involved in the training of scientists and museum personnel from African countries, and in the development and implementation of heritage policy in Africa. She edits a bulletin for teachers, entitled AnthroNotes, that is distributed three times a year to several hundred individuals and institutions interested in anthropological perspectives on current issues. She has led research projects in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Sweden, France, China, Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Kenya.
Since 1998, she has focused her research on reconstructing the genesis of hominin technology, a period for which the archaeological record is meager. In 2011, her annual field expedition in northern Kenya, west of Turkana Basin, yielded the earliest archaeological site known, dated at 3.3 million years. This unique discovery has profound implications for understanding the emergence and the first evolutionary steps of a new and unique behaviour among primates: the making of stone tools. These early tools likely represent a transitional phase in the hominin behavioural repertoire between the pounding-oriented technique chimpanzees use when engaged in nut cracking and the more advanced flaking-oriented knapping of later Oldowan tool makers. They suggest that the earliest stone knapping develop naturally from pre-existing bashing behaviors and generate new hypotheses about the adaptive roles tool-making and use have played for the earliest tool makers. This discovery could lead to the hypothesis that stone cutting-tool production originated in patterns of stone tool use likely to have been practiced by the last common ancestor of panins and humans, more than 6 million years ago.
Dr. Hildebrand has conducted several different projects using diverse data sources. Her PhD fieldwork used ethnobotanical and ethnoarchaeological methods to develop models of domestication for southwest Ethiopian crops. Her postdoctoral fieldwork tested these models via survey and excavation of rockshelters in southern and southwest Ethiopia. She also excavated at a large granary complex on Sai Island in northern Sudan, tracing early storage of domestic plants there c. 4000 years ago.
Since 2007, Dr. Hildebrand has conducted fieldwork on Holocene archaeology west of Lake Turkana, and directed the multidisciplinary Later Prehistory of West Turkana (LPWT) research team. One focus of LPWT excavations is megalithic pillar sites, whose massive basalt columns, extended elliptical platforms, and adjacent stone circles and cairns suggest they served special ceremonial purposes. LPWT research has shown these pillar sites were built 4200 years ago, just as herding spread into the area, and long before farming was practiced. At the same time people began making a new kind of pottery, the beautifully decorated “Nderit Ware.” Thus, major social changes accompanied the economic reorientation from near-sedentary hunting/gathering/herding by Turkana’s lakeshore to a more mobile pastoral economy. Current LPWT research is exploring artifactual variation between four different pillar sites that used at roughly the same time, but possibly for different ritual purposes or by distinct groups of people. Future research will examine habitation sites, where Kenya’s earliest herders made their day-to-day lives.
Dr. Hildebrand has conducted several different projects using diverse data sources. Her PhD fieldwork used ethnobotanical and ethnoarchaeological methods to develop models of domestication for southwest Ethiopian crops. Her postdoctoral fieldwork tested these models via survey and excavation of rockshelters in southern and southwest Ethiopia. She also excavated at a large granary complex on Sai Island in northern Sudan, tracing early storage of domestic plants there c. 4000 years ago.
Since 2007, Dr. Hildebrand has conducted fieldwork on Holocene archaeology west of Lake Turkana, and directed the multidisciplinary Later Prehistory of West Turkana (LPWT) research team. One focus of LPWT excavations is megalithic pillar sites, whose massive basalt columns, extended elliptical platforms, and adjacent stone circles and cairns suggest they served special ceremonial purposes. LPWT research has shown these pillar sites were built 4200 years ago, just as herding spread into the area, and long before farming was practiced. At the same time people began making a new kind of pottery, the beautifully decorated “Nderit Ware.” Thus, major social changes accompanied the economic reorientation from near-sedentary hunting/gathering/herding by Turkana’s lakeshore to a more mobile pastoral economy. Current LPWT research is exploring artifactual variation between four different pillar sites that used at roughly the same time, but possibly for different ritual purposes or by distinct groups of people. Future research will examine habitation sites, where Kenya’s earliest herders made their day-to-day lives.
