In his native Kenya, he
recruits students to help
unearth human history.Nairobi-born Isaiah Nengo was in high
school when he found his life’s work,
on a trip to the National Museums of
Kenya. A lecture that day by renowned
paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey
captivated Nengo. After college he vol-
unteered there, and Leakey helped him
get into a Ph.D. program at Harvard
University.
Nengo began fieldwork in the
mid-1980s in western Kenya, where
the first fossil he excavated was the
pelvis of a 17-million-year-old ape. “I
didn’t know at the time just how lucky
I was,” he says, laughing. In 2014 he
led an expedition in Kenya’s Turkana
Basin that discovered the most com-
plete fossil skull of an ape ever found, a
13-million-year-old ancestor of today’s
apes and humans. The team gave the
skull’s owner the nickname Alesi, from
the Turkana word for “ancestor.”
Nengo teaches at New York’s Stony
Brook University and Kenya’s Turkana
University College. He also runs a mas-
ter’s program in human evolutionary
biology that was launched at Turkana
University in 2017. Aiming to build local
expertise and research capacity, the
program has admitted eight students
so far, all Kenyans, six of them women.
Nengo would like to add students from
neighboring countries in future years.
“Training Africans from East Africa
is not charity,” he says. “It’s actually
essential to the science.” jISAIAH NENGO
BY HICKS WOGAN PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK THIESSEN
INNOVATOR
EXPLORE
The National Geographic Society has
funded the work of paleoanthropolo-
gist Isaiah Nengo since 2018. Learn more
about its support of Explorers researching
history and culture at natgeo.com/impact.