A million years of human history in Kenyan majesty

'Incredible visit'

Christina White, a distant cousin of Mary Leakey, visited the Olorgesailie site on Jan 10 and described it as "incredible", calling the sheer number of hand axes found there extraordinary.

"You don't see that anywhere else. What's lovely to see is that all the axes, whether they come from Europe, China, probably anywhere, are roughly the same shape and are made roughly the same way, with different stones, but mainly, flint," she says.

White adds that while at other archaeological sites, it is presumed that early humans traded stone tools and took them with them as they traveled, it appears that at Olorgesailie, they discarded the tools they made.

"I know they are heavy, so you wouldn't want to carry too many, but that's unusual in itself. It's like they may have killed one animal and then dropped them, and then quickly made another when they had to kill another animal. So, it's fascinating," she says.

Apart from her interest in seeing the tools, White also speaks about imagining how Homo erectus behaved and lived while walking around the site, how the area would have looked when the lake existed and there were rivers flowing into it, as well as the thought that she may well have been walking on buried artifacts.

One of the excavation sites produced a humerus, or upper arm bone, of an extinct elephant species that was more closely related to the Indian elephant than to the modern African elephant. The bone is larger than that of the modern African elephant.

Specimens from Olorgesailie are among the last known bones of this species, which existed nearly 3 million years ago and became extinct about 600,000 years ago.

White says it was interesting to learn that the extinct elephant was more closely related to the Asian elephant, and that it was significantly taller and had smaller ears, much like modern Asian elephants.

She speculates that African elephants may have evolved from their Asian counterparts, developing larger ears to help regulate body temperature. Additionally, they may have become smaller in size because of the extreme heat of the region.

Regarding the hippo fossils, White says that while it remains unclear whether they were killed or died naturally, it is possible that early humans used their skins to make baskets or fishing implements.

White, who was visiting Kenya for two weeks to attend the 60th wedding anniversary of her Nairobi-resident uncle, said that he had encouraged her to visit Olorgesailie.

She had previously visited Olduvai Gorge, a paleoanthropological site in the eastern Serengeti Plain of northern Tanzania, which is famous for the discoveries of hominin fossils by Louis and Mary Leakey.

White speaks about visiting Mary Leakey when she was in her 20s. She said that Leakey, who was in her 70s at the time, had a deep influence on her life.

She also expressed her desire for a story about the Olorgesailie Prehistoric Site to be published in a widely read international magazine dedicated to archaeology, such as Current Archaeology or World Archaeology, to raise global awareness of the site's significance.