Kenya: Hands off the Turkana Boy!
Dr. Richard Leakey, famous palaeoanthropologist and
Honorary Associate of Rationalist International
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Creationists are trying to hide the world’s most important collection of evidence for the evolution of man. The National Museum of Kenya owns a treasure of hominid fossils, documenting the development of our early ancestors. While the Museum is currently under renovation, powerful Evangelical church leaders try to press the authorities to swiftly “change the focus” of its exhibitions when reopening on 7 June 2007 and dump the pillars of our knowledge about the origin of Homo sapiens in the back rooms.
Leading paleoanthropologist Dr. Richard Leakey beats back. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph (London), he called the church plans “the most outrageous comments I have ever heard”. “The National Museum of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory for the origin of mankind. The collection it holds is one of Kenya’s very few claims to global fame, and it must be forthright to defending its right to be on the forefront of this branch of science”, he said. Dr. Leakey has been the director of the National Museum and of Kenya’s entire museum system for many years. Major parts of the Museum have been built up by his father, the equally famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey , whose Memorial Building houses the Museum’s archeology and palaeontology departments.
Among the jewels of the Museum’s fossil collection is the Turkana Boy , the skeleton of an seven to nine-year-old boy, who lived some 1.7 million years back at the Turkana Lake in northern Kenya. It is the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus and has been discovered in 1984 by Dr. Richard Leakey and his team. There are more than 200 hominid fossils, unearthed in the Koobi Fora archeological site in Turkana district by Dr. Richard Leakey’s team and others. The site is one of the Monuments of National Heritage held under jurisdiction of the National Museum and has produced more hominid fossils between 1964 and 1994 than the rest of the world’s fossil sites together in 60 years. Other famous findings from Koobi Fora are the first Australopithecus skull, a skull of the Homo Habilis and of the 1.6 million-year-old Homo erectus , all found by Dr. Leakey and his research assistants.
Bishop Bonifes Adoyo , head of the “Christ is the Answer Ministries”, the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, is among those, who would like to vanish the fossil collection in thin air. Appealing to the six million Pentecostals and other Evangelical groups in Kenya, he tries to pressurize the administration of the National Museum to give creationism a chance. “The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact”, he said. “Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory.”
Creationists and Pentecostals, hands off the Turkana Boy!