National Museum of Kenya
State collection holding fossil evidence that early human relatives butchered and ate one another over a million years ago.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the National Museum of Kenya centers on a single shin bone, pulled from a dig near Lake Turkana by Mary Leakey in 1970 and left largely unexamined in a locked cabinet for nearly fifty years. It follows Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner, who reopened the drawer in 2017 hunting for predator bite marks and instead found nine short, straight grooves that stopped her cold. You'll hear how she sent a mold of the marks to a colleague in Colorado to compare against known butchery patterns. The bone itself never left the building; it still sits in the vault behind the gallery you're standing in.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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