Displaying items by tag: prehistory
The National Museum of Kenya houses collections, and temporary and permanent exhibits. Today the National Museum of Kenya manages over 22 regional museums, many sites, and monuments across the country.
The Museum aims to interpret Kenya’s rich heritage and offers a one stop for visitors to sample the country’s rich heritage both for education and leisure. In addition to the museum, visitors are treated to a variety of shopping and dining facilities, as well as botanical gardens that offer a serene environment.
Also within the grounds are the famous Snake Park, Botanical Gardens and Nature Trail.
Lake Turkana is a massive inland sea, the largest desert lake in the world. This single body of water is over 250 kilometers long- longer than the entire Kenyan coast. It is widely known as the Jade Sea, because of the remarkable, almost incandescent, colour of its waters.
Turkana has one of the longest living histories on earth, and recent fossil evidence unearthed at Koobi Fora has led to the Lake being referred to as ‘The Cradle of Mankind’. The site lies at the heart of the Sibiloi National Park, a place of stark beauty and prehistoric petrified forests.
The Lake itself is a natural treasure, with the world’s single largest crocodile population. In Turkana these reptiles grow to record size, with some of the largest specimens found on remote windswept Central Island.
The most saline of Africa’s large lakes, Turkana is an outstanding laboratory for the study of plant and animal communities. The three National Parks serve as a stopover for migrant waterfowl and are major breeding grounds for the Nile crocodile, hippopotamus and a variety of venomous snakes. The Koobi Fora deposits, rich in mammalian, molluscan and other fossil remains, have contributed more to the understanding of paleo-environments than any other site on the continent.
Kenya’s Machu Picchu, the lost city of Gedi Once buried in jungle, this ancient Swahili town was not discovered until the 1940s.
Built in the 13th century and abandoned in the 17th century – some say due to the arrival of cannibals – it features ruined sultan’s palaces, sunken gardens and a network of medieval streets. It is also reputedly haunted by a dark creature that always seems to have just disappeared around a bend in the walls: yet always seems to be watching you.