Dino Martins began serving as the director of Stony Brook University’s Turkana Basin Institute this past September. He succeeded Lawrence Martin, who has served as the director of the institute since 2007.
Martins, a Kenyan entomologist and evolutionary biologist, has served as the CEO of TBI (Kenya) Ltd. since 2022, and has been affiliated with the institute since 2011.
His latest mission is leading the vision of research and discovery around some of the biggest questions, from the earliest of human civilization to contemporary challenges, and the future of our changing planet.
Q: How does climate change everything?
One of the things that Turkana Basin offers in terms of understanding human history is that climate change has been a critical part of human evolution.
Thanks to climate change in the Miocene, which is over tens of millions of years ago, the savannas and grasslands spread across the African continent. This period of drying and warming resulted in early primates basically adapting to drier, hotter, more open conditions. So, our scientists come from all over the world to East Africa and are able to access a deep record of change through time.
And this is both through the quantitative evidence in the terms of the fossils that are found and actually show you how both early humans and animals and plants and other creatures adapted to these landscapes that were changing through time, but also through the qualitative evidence, which is this long record of change over time.
Q: Let’s talk about the value of studying this region.
So the Turkana Basin holds over a hundred million years worth of evidence, and that includes early humans, as well as more recent human lineages that migrate out of Africa, all the way to the few thousand years before the present where domestication of animals and livestock and pastoralism is an important part of the landscape. So the Turkana Basin offers this unique and breathtaking opportunity to look at not just humans, but life adapting to different climates over time.
The other amazing aspect of the Turkana Basin that is relevant to climate change is the fact that we have one of the best records of past climate. Thanks to all the work done on human evolution, the geology and the reconstruction of old climate changes and patterns has been done at a very fine scale.
And this is because the lake that sits in the Rift Valley has gone up and down over time over many millions of years and has resulted in a series of sediments and deposits that geologists have come and very carefully studied. So it has allowed a reconstruction of past climate at a very precise level.
So we can now look to the past and understand historical climate change, look at the present and understand current climate conditions, but most importantly, take this information and look to the future to understand where climate change is going to challenge us further and how we’re going to have to adapt to it.
Q: Climate change is often spoken about as a recent experience, and generational. What you’re talking about is embedded almost in our DNA? How has climate changed the way we’ve evolved as humans and civilizations?
Historical climate change that we can read in these wonderful sediments of the Turkana Basin teach us several lessons that are relevant today. They tell us about how we have changed and adapted as humans. Humans are one of the most versatile species on the planet. From our African origins in the Rift Valley, we have moved to almost every corner of the Earth.
We exist across a wide range of climate conditions and geographies. We engage with nature in so many different incredible ways. And that is really thanks to this wonderful brain and the amazing technology and our behavior and culture, but also to the fact that we are a social species that engages with each other and looks after each other.
So I’d say one of the real lessons that comes out of time is more a lesson about how we are a social being. That our care and compassion for each other is important, a critical part of our success, but also our ability to respond to difficult conditions and challenges. And we see that today. Many communities are facing climate disasters or climate changes that are happening in their landscape.
How are they able to respond? They are responding by being together, by standing together. No one can respond to climate change alone. It really takes a community, you know, to engage with it and it affects a community. It doesn’t just affect individuals. So one of the lessons from the past that I think is very relevant is that humans are social creatures.
Our culture, especially in recent times, has allowed us to adapt. And that culture includes having empathy and compassion towards each other and other creatures, and is allowing us to adapt currently. Another interesting lesson that we can learn from the past that’s relevant to the future is that, first of all, climate has always changed.
But what is crucial now is the rate of change.
Q: What lessons can we learn from this change?
One of the amazing things is a question we can ask is about how life evolved to survive, not just at high temperatures, but in extremely harsh conditions. Very arid, very challenging. And one of the interesting things that’s coming out of this is that actual cooperation, symbiosis, partnerships between species, between different microbes and insects or microbes and plants and fungi is really what allows survival in these harsh conditions.
So I think that’s a bigger lesson for us as scientists and as humans that actually to survive this requires a lot more cooperation, a lot more exchange; not just in a biological sense, but actually in a social sense as well.
There are some things that are just pushing people over the threshold of adaptation and challenging them. Now that doesn’t mean that people are failing completely. There are a lot of challenges. People are trying to adapt, but it’s very challenging to adapt when the conditions change so rapidly and are so unpredictable. We’ve gone from extreme drought in a year to flooding because now when rainfall does come, it comes in much more violent storms.
This is something we’re seeing all over the world. Higher ocean temperatures lead to much more moisture in the atmosphere that change, you know, currents and winds and lead to much stronger weather events.
Q: So, having conversations about the direction of climate research at the Turkana Basin Institute is incredibly important, as well as here at Stony Brook. What role does this relationship play?
Climate change is one of the most challenging and exciting intellectual questions that we currently face. It’s so broad and so impactful of many aspects of human life that no one scientist or one discipline can fully engage with it.
So, we actually have a great lesson to share and learn from the grassroots, from people who are actually experiencing high temperatures. How are they changing their daily life and their life cycles to respond to these changes in the environment is very important.
One of the exciting things about the conversations taking place here at Stony Brook through the Collaborative for the Earth and other initiatives that are emerging is seeing scientists from very different parts of the university coming together. And I’m very pleased that the Turkana Basin Institute is serving as a catalyst for some of those conversations.
The Institute was founded by Dr. Richard Leakey, who was a professor here at Stony Brook, and a wonderful paleontologist, a conservationist, and someone who really cared about the world, about science, and about scholarship.
The Institute currently has about 200 scientists from all over the world and from Africa. We have two campuses in northern Kenya, one on either side of Lake Turkana, and scientists come from many different disciplines from the paleo sciences. That includes paleontology, human evolution, archeology, geology, but also, growing the research in areas of climate and biodiversity conservation and sustainability.
Q: Can you give an example?
At the moment, we have a number of our scientists in the geosciences and in anthropology who are working together on questions of past climate and environmental change. This data is actually also being used by scientists from SoMAS who are working on questions of Lake Turkana and its climate.
We can build more comprehensive databases about the chemistry of lakes, about geological change, about the details of all the incredible fossils that are found within the basin. We could tie all those threads together to create a much more complete picture that other scientists from other disciplines and young scientists in particular can take up and weave a new picture about where things are today and where they might go.
To learn more about current research projects in the Turkana Basin, visit turkanabasin.org
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