Summary Of "The Origin Of Humankind" By Richard Leakey - UNIVERSITY SUMMARIES - E-book - ePub

In 1974, less than a year after its inhabitants left the site, excavator Diane Glifford carefully began to uncover a camp on the shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The hominids were modern humans, members of the Dassanetch tribe, a pastoral Cushitic people, which inhabit the northeast bank of Lake Turkana and extend into Ethiopia. The reason modern living camps are studied is that this exercise helps to better interpret and understand the scant evidence that appears from ancient camps.
In addition, the link between then and now is particularly relevant due to the remarkable similarity of scenery between this camp and an old settlement located a few kilometers further north, along the shore. There, more than two million years ago on the edge of the lake, a small band of hominids established a temporary base, the same as the Dassanetch group. The discoveries made at that site and the hundreds of finds made in neighboring camps along the eastern bank of Lake Turkana are combined with fossils exhumed by research teams further north in Ethiopia and further south in Tanzania.
and they help transform our vision of the path traveled by human evolution. The fossils that are discovered in Africa provide information to be able to draw a picture of the evolutionary history of our ancestors.