Dr. Fredrick Kyalo Manthi (1967- )
Brief biography
Oral history interview recorded May 7, 2026
Interviewer: Bernard A. Wood
Kyalo Manthi’s father, from the Kamba community in Makueni, Kenya, started working for Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge in the 1970s. Manthi was fascinated by his father’s involvement in prehistory, so in 1986, as soon as he turned 18, he travelled with his father to Mary Leakey’s home in Langata to ask if she could help him get a job at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). Richard Leakey, the NMK Director at the time, offered Manthi a trainee research assistantship and his first field experience was with Kamoya Kimeu who was excavating the Turkana Boy (KNM-WT 15000).
The late Frank Brown saw Manthi’s potential, and behind the scenes Brown not only provided personal and financial support that enabled Manthi to attend college, he was also influential in the Leakey Foundation’s decision to support Manthi’s studies at the University of Cape Town, where he earned a BA, MPhil and a PhD in Archeology. It is doubly unfortunate that Brown did not live long enough to celebrate Manthi’s substantial achievements, especially his election to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2024.
Apart from three years as a Turkana Basin Institute postdoctoral researcher at Stony Brook University, Manthi has spent all his career at the NMK, where he is currently the Director of Antiquities, Sites and Monuments. Manthi occasionally works at Lemudong’o, a Late Miocene site in the south-western Kenyan Rift, but most of his fieldwork has been at sites in the Turkana Basin in northern Kenya (e.g., Kanapoi, Kakwat, Lomekwi, Loruth Kaado, Nariokotome, and Natodomeri). Manthi is best known for his work at Kanapoi, a site introduced to him by Meave Leakey, where latterly he has worked with Carol Ward and J. Michael Plavcan. Most recently, he has been working in previously unexplored, much younger sediments in northern Kenya.
Manthi’s PhD focused on the fossil micromammals from Kanapoi, which he studied to reconstruct the environmental contexts in which Australopithecus anamensis lived, but his expertise now extends across the large mammal fossil record.
Manthi is one of the few senior African researchers educated and trained within that continent who have made their academic base within Africa. Manthi’s career and achievements are an inspiration for those who follow in his footsteps.
Fredrick Kyalo Manthi Oral History Videos
Oral History Transcript
The transcript below is free to read and download.