History of Kenya - Prehistory

Prehistory

It was in 1929 that the first evidence of the presence of ancient early human ancestors in Kenya was discovered when Louis Leakey unearthed 1 million year old Acheulian hand axes at Kariandusi in south west Kenya. Subsequently many species of early hominid have been discovered in Kenya. The oldest was found by Martin Pickford in the year 2000 and is the 6 million years old Orrorin tugenensis, named after the Tugen Hills where it was unearthed . It is the second oldest fossil hominid in the world after Sahelanthropus tchadensis. In 1995 Meave Leakey named a new species of hominid Australopithecus anamensis following a series of fossil discoveries near Lake Turkana in 1965, 1987 and 1994, and is around 4.1 million years old. One of the most famous and complete hominid skeletons ever discovered was the 1.6 million year old Homo erectus known as the Turkana Boy which was found by Kamoya Kimeu in 1984 on an excavation led by Richard Leakey. The oldest Acheulean tools ever discovered anywhere in the world are from West Turkana, and were dated in 2011 through the method of magnetostratigraphy to about 1.76 million years old.

The first inhabitants of present-day Kenya were hunter-gatherer groups, akin to the modern Khoisan speakers. Cushitic language-speaking people from northern Africa moved into the area that is now Kenya beginning around 2000 BC. The Bantu expansion is estimated to have reached during the 1st millennium BC or the early centuries AD.

Remarkable prehistoric sites in the interior of Kenya include the archaeoastronomical site Namoratunga on the west side of Lake Turkana and the walled settlement of ThimLich Ohinga in Nyanza Province.