Nickname:
Turkana Boy
Site:
Nariokotome, West Turkana, Kenya
Date of discovery:
1984
Discovered by:
Kamoya Kimeu
Age:
About 1.6 million years ago
Species:
The strapping youth
The ‘Turkana Boy’ skeleton has allowed scientists to find out a lot of information about body size, body shape, and growth rates of Homo erectus. Using bilateral symmetry to fill in missing bone (e.g., the missing left upper arm bone can be reconstructed as the mirror image of the right upper arm bone), his skeleton is over 90% complete.
The size and shape of the pelvis shows he was male, and his teeth tell he was eight or nine years old. He was 1.6 m (5 ft 3 in) tall and weighed 48 kg (106 lb) when he died; if he had reached adulthood, he might have grown to nearly 1.85 m (6 ft). Turkana Boy’s cranial capacity at death was 880 cubic centimeters, but scientists estimate it would have reached 909 cubic centimeters if he had grown into adulthood. There is evidence that he was growing up at a rate similar to modern humans, and he may have undergone an adolescent growth spurt characteristic of modern teenage boys. His cause of death at such a young age is an inflammation in mouth.
His long and slender body is evidence of an early human adaptation to the hot, dry climate of Africa. His long legs and narrow pelvis helped him walk farther, increasing his home range, and maybe even run long distances.
The Turkana Boy lived in a region of active volcanoes whose deposits can be dated. When ash or lava from a volcano has cooled, radioactive potassium 40 in the material begins to decay at a known rate to stable argon 40. By measuring the proportions of potassium 40 and argon 40 present today, scientists can determine how much time has elapsed since the rock formed, and, by inference, the age of fossils found in or between the rock layers. In recent decades, a refinement to the technique has involved measuring the ratio of artificially made argon39 to argon 40. Both conventional potassium-argon and argon-argon dating were used to determine that the Turkana Boy was sandwiched between volcanic ashes respectively dated to about 1.88 million and about 1.39 million years ago. By using measurements of how distant the skeleton was from each of these layers and assumptions about how fast the intervening layers would have formed, an estimated age of about 1.53million years was obtained.
The average day for Homo erectus would be in search of food. Having big body and twice as big brain as chimps he needed a lot of calories, and meat is a perfect source. However to get enough meet is very exhausting and hard. They were following a prey in the midday, because of the ability to sweat the could run for long distances and chase their prey(if they have been hunters). If they were scavengers, they would search carefully for leftovers after big hunting animals, or possibly even follow them carefully. At evenings they set along the fire and cooked their trophies, socializing and eating.
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