Hidden ancestors Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya's national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones (Mike Pflanz, Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2006). The collection includes the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus - the 1.7 million-year-old Turkana Boy - unearthed by Dr Richard Leakey and his team in 1984 at Nariokotome, near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The museum also holds several specimens of Australopithecus anamensis, believed to be the first hominid to walk upright four million years ago, The collection has cemented the global reputation of Kenya's Great Rift Valley as the cradle of mankind, and is a major tourist draw. However, according to Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, the head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, 'the Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact'. His view is that it should be downplayed - something that Dr Leakey himself views as 'the most outrageous comments I have ever heard'.
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