Tugen Hills
0°45′10″N 35°52′30″E / 0.7529°N 35.8749°E The Tugen Hills (also known as Saimo) are a series of hills in Baringo County, Kenya. They are located in the central-western portion of Kenya.
The Tugen Hills represent one of the few areas in Africa preserving a succession of deposits from the period of between 14 and 4 million years ago, making them an important location for the study of human (and animal) evolution. Excavations at the site conducted by Richard Leakey and others have yielded a complete skeleton of a 1.5-million-year-old elephant (1967), a new species of monkey (1969) and fossil remains of hominids from 1 to 2 million years ago.[1]
Six-million-year-old hominid fossils were discovered here in 2000 by Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford;[2] the species was named Orrorin tugenensis after the location. This was the oldest hominid ever discovered in Kenya, and the second oldest in the world after Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
Footnotes
- ^ "First chimpanzee fossils found". BBC News. 2005-08-31. Retrieved 2008-03-16.
- ^ Senut, Brigitte; Pickford, Marti; Gommery, Dominique; Mein, Pierre; Cheboi, Kiptalam; Coppens, Yves (2001). "First hominid from the Miocene (Lukeino Formation, Kenya)" (PDF). Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences. 332 (2): 140. Bibcode:2001CRASE.332..137S. doi:10.1016/S1251-8050(01)01529-4. Retrieved 30 Oct 2016.
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External links
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