This lanky ancestor possessed a human-like body, but its brain still had a ways to go.
Teeth are a dime a dozen in the human fossil record, but precious few skeletons have been found.
That alone makes Turkana boy a paleo-celebrity. This fossil, however, also provides keen insight on a critical moment in human evolution. Everything that came before the boy and his kind could be called bipedal apes. Some of them even created the first stone tools, but they had ape-like bodies if not brains. It invented a more complex toolkit, specialized for procuring more meat and other protein to fuel a bigger body.