Discovery and Representative Fossils
The South African palaeontologist John T. Robinson first discovered a mandible of a new hominid in southern Africa in 1949; he named the species Telanthropus capensis, though it is now recognised as a member of Homo ergaster. The name was first applied by Colin Groves and Vratislav Mazák to KNM-ER 992, a mandible discovered near Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana), Kenya in 1975, which became the type-specimen of the species. The most complete skeleton of H. ergaster (and one of the most complete extinct hominids to date), KNM-WT 15000, was discovered at Lake Turkana, Kenya, in 1984 by paleoanthropologists Kamoya Kimeu and Alan Walker. They nicknamed the 1.6-million-year-old specimen "Turkana Boy".
Read more about this topic: Homo Ergaster
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