Gateway to the Jade Sea — a dry Turkana city beside the oldest complete human fossil site on Earth
Lodwar is the capital of Turkana County in northwestern Kenya, the gateway to Lake Turkana — the Jade Sea, the world's largest permanent desert lake and one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Africa. The lake's vivid blue-green colour (from algae in the alkaline water) set against a landscape of black lava, bleached boulders, and the Turkana heat shimmer creates a scene of austere, alien beauty. Lake Turkana's Koobi Fora site on the eastern shore contains the most important concentration of early human fossils in the world; the West Turkana site at Nariokotome yielded the Turkana Boy ske…
Lake Turkana has been at the centre of paleoanthropology since Richard and Meave Leakey's surveys in the 1970s revealed it as one of the richest early hominid fossil sites on the planet. The lake was known to Europeans before this — Count Teleki and Lieutenant von Hohnel were the first Europeans to reach it in 1888, naming it Lake Rudolf after the Crown Prince of Austria; Kenya renamed it Lake Turkana in 1975. The Turkana people are one of East Africa's largest Nilotic pastoralist groups, having migrated south from South Sudan over the past few centuries. The construction of the Gibe III dam…