Tugen Hills

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.

Due to the “Original man of Tugen Hills” in where it was inferred that it was the oldest hominid fossil ever found, said place holds a lot of crucial information regarding long term environmental change.

Regarding the environment dating to the Miocene period, within the Tugen Hills the history of the East African Rift can be seen through tectonic plate movement and volcanic rocks.

Tugen Hills at Kenya is a key site in understanding paleoanthropological research as well as the divergence, as previously mentioned, from humans to modern apes.