Francis Mwenda Kirera

FRANCIS KIRERA, Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, received funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Paleoanthropological Investigation of New High Elevation Fossil and Stone Tool-rich Sites in the West Mt. Kenya region, Kenya.” The East Africa Rift Valley System (EARS) has been the source of notable early human fossils that have defined the study of hominin evolution. Unfortunately, this region constitutes a small fraction of the African landmass that early humans potentially inhabited. The scarcity of sites beyond the EARS limits our interpretation of hominin evolution in the context of diverse continental ecological zones.  The newly reported paleontological and archeological sites in the Central Highlands of Kenya (CHK) allow us to test hypotheses regarding the evolution of hominins in the tropical high-altitude environment beyond the EARS. We conducted fieldwork on several Pleistocene and Holocene sites in the Ngobit and Gatarakwa areas. We aimed to collect field data to address the hypothesis that the CHK was a hub for human bio-cultural evolution. We assume that the high-altitude conditions shaped hominins and other mammalian fauna’s speciation, extinction, and dispersal events. Some of the significant discoveries we made include a double burial site at Ngobit 1, cranial remains of an extinct giant bovid (cf. Syncerus sp.) from the Karuchwa site, and the recovery of additional fossils belonging to a new species of Antidorcas from the Ngobit 1 site. We also collected various samples for dating and paleoenvironmental reconstruction.