Qualla: Tugen Hills https://qualla.com/tugen-hills en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:29 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/1/s/tugen-hills-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Tugen Hills https://qualla.com/tugen-hills Tugen Hills: Introduction https://qualla.com/tugen-hills/ Photo credit Chartep, CC BY-SA 3.0. Some places keep time better than others. The Tugen Hills, rising above the Kerio Valley in Kenya's Rift, are one of the rare spots on Earth where the rock has saved a nearly continuous record of the last fourteen million years - layer upon layer of ancient lakebeds and volcanic ash, stacked like the pages of a book no one could read until they learned how. Buried in those pages is one of the most important fossils in the story of human origins: a creature that lived around six million years ago and may have stood and walked on two legs long before our better-known ancestors did. Scientists gave it a name in the local Tugen language - Orrorin, "original man."

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Image: Chartep | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/1/s/tugen-hills-wp/sb1s-tugen-hills-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Tugen Hills: The Rift's Long Memory https://qualla.com/tugen-hills/ Photo credit Shadychiri, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Tugen Hills owe their existence to the East African Rift, the great tear in the continent where the land is slowly pulling apart. As the rift stretched and dropped, volcanoes erupted and lakes formed and vanished, and each episode laid down sediment that trapped the bones and...

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Image: Shadychiri | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/1/s/tugen-hills-wp/sb1s-tugen-hills-the-rifts-long-memory.mp3 0:06 2 full Tugen Hills: Millennium Man https://qualla.com/tugen-hills/ Photo credit Emőke Dénes, CC BY-SA 4.0. The discovery that made the Tugen Hills famous came in the year 2000, when a French-led team headed by Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford recovered fossils from the Lukeino beds dating to roughly six million years ago. They named the species the following year: Orrorin tugenensis...

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Image: Emőke Dénes | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/1/s/tugen-hills-wp/sb1s-tugen-hills-millennium-man.mp3 0:06 3 full Tugen Hills: Did It Walk? https://qualla.com/tugen-hills/ Photo credit Shadychiri, CC BY-SA 4.0. What made Orrorin so provocative was not just its age but a single, ordinary-looking bone. Its thigh bones suggested that this chimpanzee-sized creature already walked upright - that bipedalism, long thought to be a relatively late hallmark of our family, might reach back six mil...

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Image: Shadychiri | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/1/s/tugen-hills-wp/sb1s-tugen-hills-did-it-walk.mp3 0:06 4 full Tugen Hills: A Crossroads of Evolution https://qualla.com/tugen-hills/ Photo credit Shadychiri, CC BY-SA 4.0. Orrorin is the headline, but it is not the whole story the hills tell. Excavations here, including work by members of the famous Leakey family, have turned up a complete skeleton of a 1.5-million-year-old elephant, an extinct species of monkey, and the remains of hominids from ac...

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Image: Shadychiri | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/1/s/tugen-hills-wp/sb1s-tugen-hills-a-crossroads-of-evolution.mp3 0:06 5 full