Turkana Boy
English
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Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Named after Lake Turkana, Kenya, near which the fossil was discovered in 1984 by Kenyan palaeontologist Kamoya Kimeu, on the bank of the Nariokotome River.
Proper noun
[edit]- (archaeology) The nearly complete fossilised skeleton of a Homo ergaster youth (estimated 7–11 years old at death) who lived 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago.
- 1995, Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail, Cambridge University Press, page 118:
- The prime importance of the Turkana Boy is that he represented the earliest kind of human we know of whose general body proportions matched those of living people.
- 1999, Barry Bogin, Patterns of Human Growth, Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition, page 202,
- As Homo erectus is no chimpanzee, Turkana boy’s true age at death was probably between seven and 11 years. What is clear is that the Turkana boy followed a pattern of growth that is neither that of a modern human nor that of a chimpanzee.
- 2009, Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, Simon & Schuster (Free Press), page 197,
- The most famous specimen of Homo ergaster, and one of the most complete pre-human fossils ever found, is the Turkana Boy, or Nariokotome Boy, discovered by Kamoya Kimeu, star fossil-finder of Richard Leakey's team of palaeontologists.
- The Turkana Boy lived approximately 1.6 million years ago and died at the age of about eleven.
Synonyms
[edit]- Nariokotome Boy
- KNM-WT 15000 (fossil designation by National Museums of Kenya)
Translations
[edit]fossilised skeleton of a Homo ergaster youth
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