turkana boy
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.38 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
1
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
The nearly complete fossilised skeleton of a Homo ergaster youth (estimated 7–11 years old at death) who lived 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago.
name
Alternative letter-case form of Turkana Boy.
Example Sentences
- "The prime importance of the Turkana Boy is that he represented the earliest kind of human we know of whose general body proportions matched those of living people."
- "As Homo erectus is no chimpanzee, Turkana boy’s true age at death was probably between seven and 11 years. What is clear is that the Turkana boy followed a pattern of growth that is neither that of a modern human nor that of a chimpanzee."
- "2009, Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, Simon & Schuster (Free Press), page 197, The most famous specimen of Homo ergaster, and one of the most complete pre-human fossils ever found, is the Turkana Boy, or Nariokotome Boy, discovered by Kamoya Kimeu, star fossil-finder of Richard Leakey's team of palaeontologists. The Turkana Boy lived approximately 1.6 million years ago and died at the age of about eleven."
Etymology
Named after Lake Turkana, Kenya, near which the fossil was discovered in 1984 by Kenyan palaeontologist Kamoya Kimeu, on the bank of the Nariokotome River.
Synonyms
Nariokotome Boy
KNM-WT 15000