A 750,000 year old hominin molar from the site of Nadung'a, West Turkana, Kenya.
Compared to that of Eurasia, the hominin fossil record of Middle Pleistocene Africa is exceedingly sparse (Manzi, 2004, Manzi, 2011, Rightmire, 2008). This is especially true for the earliest stages of the Middle Pleistocene (∼780–600 kya), for which only a handful of fragmentary African fossil specimens have been recovered (Asfaw et al., 2002, Manzi, 2004, Manzi, 2011). In 2010, the West Turkana Paleontology Project from the National Museums of Kenya recovered a hominin molar, KNM-WT 51261, from the site of Nadung'a on the west side of Lake Turkana. The molar derives from the level of the Silbo Tuff dated to 750,000 (+/−20,000) years ago (McDougall and Brown, 2006), making Nadung'a one of the few early Middle Pleistocene fossil localities known in Africa. Here, we present geochronology and comparative analyses to provide an interpretive context for the KNM-WT 51261 specimen.
