The Tugen Hills (also known as Saimo) are series of hills in Baringo District, Kenya.
The Tugen Hills represent one of the few areas in Africa preserving a succession of deposits from the period of between 14 and 4 million years ago, making them an important location for the study of human (and animal) evolution. Excavations at the site conducted by Richard Leakey and others have yielded a complete skeleton of a 1.5-million-year-old elephant (1967), a new species of monkey (1969) and fossil remains of hominids from 1 to 2 million years ago.
Six million year old hominid fossils were discovered here in 2000 by Martin Pickford, the oldest ever discovered in Kenya, and the second oldest in the world after Sahelanthropus tchadensis. The species was named Orrorin tugenensis after the location.
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