Kandis River in Ongata Rongai, half an hour’s drive from Nairobi, would be the unlikeliest place palaeontologists would head for to look for 3 million-year-old fossils.
But they have been at the dry river bed for three
years now searching for the counterpart of Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old
female Australopithecus afarensis discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the
Awash Valley of Ethiopia’s Afar depression by Donald Johanson.
Lucy was nicknamed after the famous Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds of the late 1960s.
So far, fossil remains of this species of our
early ancestors have only been found in the Great Rift Valley in
Ethiopia and Lake Turkana. The Kandis site is the first outside the Rift
Valley.
Dr Emma Mbua, head of the Department of Earth
Sciences at the National Museums of Kenya, has found fossil remains of
at least three individuals: Two baby teeth found in 2011, a canine tooth
and an elbow of a possible male adult found in 2012.[...] theeastafrican.co.ke
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