Turkana Boy
A nearly complete adolescent skeleton shows a body already built for walking and running long distances.
- When
- Known to
- ± 30 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
KNM-WT 15000, found at Nariokotome in 1984, is the most complete early Homo skeleton known: a boy of about eight to twelve who died beside a lake 1.6 million years ago. He was already around 1.6 metres tall and would have exceeded 1.8 as an adult, with long legs, narrow hips and a body proportioned for heat loss in open country. His narrow spinal canal was once argued to preclude speech; that reading has since been questioned. He also shows a pathological spine, and his growth pattern was faster than a modern child's.