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Fishermen on the shores of Kenya's Lake Turkana, the world's biggest desert lake, have no doubt about what is to blame for their dwindling fish stocks: a giant hydroelectric dam built by Ethiopia on the River Omo, which feeds the lake. Complaints about the Omo dam have been overshadowed by another major water dispute, between Ethiopia and Egypt. Ethiopia is building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, which Cairo says will strangle its lifeline, the Nile. The government in Addis Ababa has said it needs the mega-dams to generate enough electricity for its population of 109 million,...

Archaeologists have uncovered a large ancient cemetery in Kenya that sheds new light on the area’s early culture. Researchers from Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History discovered the graveyard, described as the earliest and largest monumental cemetery in Eastern Africa. The find at the Lothagam North Pillar Site near Lake Turkana has surprised experts, offering new details of the ancient herders that used the cemetery. “This group is believed to have had an egalitarian society, without a stratified social hierarchy,” the researchers wrote in a statement. “Thus their construction of such a...

Explanation: Stars come out as evening twilight fades in this serene skyscape following the Persian proverb "Night hides the world, but reveals a universe." The scene finds the Sun setting over northern Kenya and the night will soon hide the shores of Lake Turkana, home to many Nile crocodiles. The region is also known for its abundance of hominid fossils. On that past November night, a brilliant Venus, then the world's evening star, dominates the starry skies above. But also revealed are faint stars, cosmic dust clouds, and glowing nebulae along the graceful arc of our own Milky Way galaxy....

Finds Challenge Ideas about Who Were the First Toolmakers Scientists working in the desert badlands of northwestern Kenya have found stone tools dating back 3.3 million years, long before the advent of modern humans, and by far the oldest such artifacts yet discovered. The tools, whose makers may or may not have been some sort of human ancestor, push the known date of such tools back by 700,000 years; they also may challenge the notion that our own most direct ancestors were the first to bang two rocks together to create a new technology. The discovery is the first evidence...

Researchers working in Kenya's archaeologically prolific Lake Turkana region claim to have uncovered a set of 3.3-million-year-old stone tools. That's 700,000 years older than the previous record, and predates evidence for the evolutionary origins of the genus Homo by half a million years. Above: A satellite image of Lake Turkana, where the stone tools – and many other artifacts and fossils of human ancestors – have been recovered NPR's Chris Joyce reports on the findings of Stony Brook University archaeologist Sonia Harmand and her colleagues, which were announced Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco:...

Out in the Kenyan desert, a trail of extremely old footprints are etched into sedimentary rock -- a memory of early humans and how they moved... around 1.5 million years ago, these are the oldest footprints that look like those made by modern humans. A team of scientists, including Brian Richmond from George Washington University, discovered these precious fossilized prints in dried mud in 2009... “A fossilized footprint is basically fossilized behavior," Richmond said. 'It shows you what the individual did 1.5 million years ago that instant in time." And what do those prints tell Richmond? "Sure enough, they were...

Footprints uncovered in Kenya show that as early as 1.5 million years ago an ancestral species, almost certainly Homo erectus, had already evolved the feet and walking gait of modern humans.