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A part of Southeast Africa, the territory of what is now Kenya has seen human habitation since the beginning of the Lower Paleolithic. The Bantu expansion from a West African center of dispersal reached the area by the 1st millennium AD. With the borders of the modern state at the crossroads of the Bantu, Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic ethno-linguistic areas of Africa, Kenya is a truly multi-ethnic state. European and Arab presence in Mombasa dates to the Early Modern period, but European exploration of the interior began only in the 19th century. The British Empire established the East Africa Protectorate in 1895, from 1920 known as the Kenya Colony. The independent Republic of Kenya was formed in 1964. It was ruled as a de facto single-party state by the Kenya African National Union (KANU), an alliance led by Jomo Kenyatta during 1963 to 2013. Kenyatta was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi, who ruled until 2002. Moi attempted to transform the ''de facto'' single-party status of Kenya into a ''de jure'' status during the 1980s, but with the end of the Cold War, the practices of political repression and torture which had been "overlooked" by the Western powers as necessary evils in the effort to contain communism were no longer tolerated. Moi came under pressure, notably by US ambassador Smith Hempstone, to restore a multi-party system, which he did by 1991. Moi won elections in 1992 and 1997, which were overshadowed by political killings on both sides. During the 1990s, evidence of Moi's involvement in human rights abuses and corruption (Goldenberg scandal) was uncovered. He was constitutionally barred from running in the 2002 election, which was won by Mwai Kibaki. Widely reported electoral fraud on Kibaki's side in the 2007 elections resulted in the 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis. ==Prehistory== In 1929, the first evidence of the presence of ancient early human ancestors in Kenya was discovered when Louis Leakey unearthed 1 million year old Acheulian hand axes at Kariandusi in south west Kenya.〔http://uq.academia.edu/CeriShipton/Papers/657047/Taphonomy_and_Behaviour_at_the_Acheulean_site_of_Kariandusi〕 Subsequently many species of early hominid have been discovered in Kenya. The oldest was found by Martin Pickford in the year 2000 and is the 6 million years old ''Orrorin tugenensis'', named after the Tugen Hills where it was unearthed . It is the second oldest fossil hominid in the world after ''Sahelanthropus tchadensis''. In 1995 Meave Leakey named a new species of hominid Australopithecus anamensis following a series of fossil discoveries near Lake Turkana in 1965, 1987 and 1994, and is around 4.1 million years old.〔Robin Hallett, ''Africa to 1875: A Modern History'' (University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1970) p. 35.〕 In 2011 3.2 million year old stone tools were discovered at Lake Turkana - these are the oldest stone tools found anywhere in the world and pre-date the emergence of Homo.〔http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32804177〕 One of the most famous and complete hominid skeletons ever discovered was the 1.6 million year old ''Homo erectus'' known as the Turkana Boy which was found by Kamoya Kimeu in 1984 on an excavation led by Richard Leakey. The oldest Acheulean tools ever discovered anywhere in the world are from West Turkana, and were dated in 2011 through the method of magnetostratigraphy to about 1.76 million years old.〔Lepre, C. J., Roche, H., Kent, D. V., Harmand, S., Quinn, R. L., Brugal, J.-P., Texier, P.-J., Lenoble, A., & Feibel, C. S. (2011)〕 Remarkable prehistoric sites in the interior of Kenya include the archaeoastronomical site Namoratunga on the west side of Lake Turkana and the walled settlement of ThimLich Ohinga in Nyanza Province. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of Kenya」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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