A ridge of Pliocene and Pleistocene claystone, siltstone and sandstone on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, eroding into badlands as seasonal rivers cut it apart, and shedding fossil mammals and early people as it goes. The name comes from the Gabbra language and means a place of the commiphora, the source of myrrh. Richard Leakey set up the Koobi Fora base camp on a sand spit running into the lake in 1968, and in 1973 Kenya made the whole region Sibiloi National Park, with the National Museums of Kenya headquartered on the spit. The park is well kept and guarded, work continues under the Koobi Fora Research Project, and the term East Turkana is now used for the same ground. This is desert country a long way from anywhere, and the wildlife matters as much as the fossils.
Hominin fossils and the earliest stone tools of East Turkana · Pliocene to Pleistocene
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Kenya
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This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
