Word.ws English Dictionary

Turkana Boy

Turkana Boy proper noun: the nearly complete fossilised skeleton of a Homo ergaster youth (estimated 7–11 years old at death) who lived 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago.

turkana boy: the nearly complete fossilised skeleton of a Homo ergaster youth (estimated 7–11 years old at...
Image: Claire Houck from New York City, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun (1)

Turkana Boy

  1. The nearly complete fossilised skeleton of a Homo ergaster youth (estimated 7–11 years old at death) who lived 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago.
    • The prime importance of the Turkana Boy is that he represented the earliest kind of human we know of whose general body proportions matched those of living people.1995, Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail, Cambridge University Press, page 118
    • As Homo erectus is no chimpanzee, Turkana boy’s true age at death was probably between seven and 11 years. What is clear is that the Turkana boy followed a pattern of growth that is neither that of a modern human nor that of a chimpanzee.1999, Barry Bogin, Patterns of Human Growth, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, page 202
    Synonyms:
    Nariokotome Boy, KNM-WT 15000

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Turkana boy

Turkana boy

  1. Alternative letter-case form of Turkana Boy.

Synonyms of Turkana Boy

Forms of Turkana Boy

alternative formTurkana boy

Origin of Turkana Boy

Named after Lake Turkana, Kenya, near which the fossil was discovered in 1984 by Kenyan palaeontologist Kamoya Kimeu, on the bank of the Nariokotome River.

Questions about Turkana Boy

What does Turkana Boy mean?
Turkana Boy means the nearly complete fossilised skeleton of a Homo ergaster youth (estimated 7–11 years old at death) who lived 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago.
What part of speech is Turkana Boy?
Turkana Boy is a proper noun.

Words near Turkana Boy in the dictionary

  1. Turk's head
  2. Turk's turban
  3. Turk.
  4. Turka
  5. Turkana
  6. Turkana Boy
  7. Turkdom
  8. Turke
  9. Turkel
  10. Turkels
  11. Turkeman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Turkana Boy (page history and authors); Turkana boy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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