In 1984, paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and his team working at Nariokotome near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya found the most complete skeleton of an early human ever discovered. They named him Turkana Boy. He was 1.5 million years old, about eight when he died, and Homo erectus. The discovery fundamentally changed the scientific understanding of human evolution, showing that the human body shape became modern much earlier than previously thought. The boy had been lying in the mud of an ancient river for one and a half million years, waiting to tell his story.