In August of 1984, a fossil expert named Kamoya Kimeu found a piece of old bone near Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya. Kimeu was part of the research team headed by Richard Leakey, a Kenyan citizen and son of famous paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey. Because of where the fossil was found, scientists believe that the individual it came from died about 1.6 million years ago. Further digging uncovered an almost complete hominid (human-like) skeleton—a very rare find.

The scientists who studied the bones learned a lot from them. The teeth showed that the individual was about 9-11 years old at death. The shape of the pelvic bone revealed that it was a boy. And the length of the arm and leg bones proved that this young boy stood around 5’6”—and would have been over six feet tall by the time he was fully grown. The fossil skeleton was given the name “Turkana boy.”

When Turkana boy was alive, human beings like us did not yet exist. Turkana boy belonged to a species called Homo ergaster or Homo erectus, which may have been an ancestor of Homo sapiens—modern human beings like us. Not much is known about people of that time. It’s likely that they had learned to use stone tools such as knives. They probably hunted or scavenged for meat and collected fruits, nuts, and tubers that grew around Lake Turkana. Their brains were about 70 percent of the size of ours. No one is sure whether they had developed language yet, but they probably lived in small, cooperative groups.

Fossil hominid bones from longer ago than Turkana boy have been found, but they probably looked and acted more like apes than people. Because they walked upright on two feet and had a brain closer to ours in size, Turkana boy and other Homo erectus individuals are considered less ape-like and more human. By finding and recognizing the fossil bones Turkana boy left behind, Kamoya Kimeu did literally ground-breaking work!