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Comic 
incoming.
Turok started off as a Dell Comics one-shot in 1954's Four Color Comics #596. In it, two pre-Contact American Indians, Turok and his young ward Andar, get lost in a cavern system while searching for water. They wind up in the Lost Valley, a place with dinosaurs and other mid-century conceptions of prehistoric creatures. Turok received another issue a year later before being given his own quarterly comic series, Turok, Son of Stone, in March 1956. The comic followed a predictable pattern: our heroes are trying to find a way out of the Lost Valley, they're attacked by a creature/caveman, they might meet a "good" group of people and protect them from the creature/caveman-looking guy, and exeunt. It went like this for 130 issues (not counting a couple of specials) and two publisher changes (to Gold Key in 1962 and to Gold Key subsidiary Whitman in 1981) before being canceled.
Then along came a young, upstart publisher called Valiant, who proceeded to license a few of Gold Key's old titles, including Turok, who gets a test run in the form of cameos in Magnus: Robot Fighter and Archer and Armstrong. In 1993, there was Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. This version of Turok was a continuation of the Son of Stone version but with added science! At some point after the end of the previous series, Andar leaves Turok to settle down with a girl from a village. While wandering the Lost Valley alone, Turok is located by a woman named Erica Pierce (she calls herself Mothergod), a woman from the future who has used her radiation-induced superpowers to set up shop in the Lost Land (no longer the Lost Valley as of here, roughly), which is revealed as a place caught all up in the timestream and where time moves super slow (thus, dinosaurs) but where other things can still accidentally arrive (thus, Turok, Andar, and all of the random people they encountered. Also robots once I think). Mothergod wants to use the Lost Land as a base from which to remake reality. It's something to do with her being displaced from her original universe, but I haven't read all of Valiant's lead-up to Unity, so I dunno.
Mothergod brainwashes Turok into helping her, which he does, but he gets better, and when Mothergod is defeated, the Lost Land starts to collapse. Andar is sent back to his own time. Turok is flung roughly a hundred years into his future. Issue one of Dinosaur Hunter starts with Turok in a Colombian jungle having found himself in the year 1987. The rest of the comic is about him dealing with Mothergod's remaining bionically-enhanced velociraptors and also all of the people who want to profit off of his being a living relic of the past. One of these people is Israel Crockett, also known as the Longhunter (hmmmm). Later in the series, Turok returns to the (now all better!) Lost Land with Andar's grandson and faces off against a robotic tyrant that calls himself the Campaigner (hmmmmmmmm). Dinosaur Hunter lasted 47 issues (with a few specials for 51 total) before being canceled in August of 1996.
Of course, by this point, Acclaim, who had bought Valiant the previous year, had already enlisted Iguana Entertainment to make a video game based off of their then-popular comic series about a Native American shooting dinosaurs. And it was very heavily influenced by Valiant's comic. The Longhunter and the Campaigner both make an appearance, as do mechanized raptors and Turok's fancy-looking bow. And here's kind of where it gets confusing. Turok: Dinosaur Hunter the game was released in February of 1997, just one month before Acclaim Comics' new reboot of Turok featuring a college student named Joshua Fireseed (he's a full-blooded American Indian, just to set the record straight) as protector of Earth and next in line for the mantle of Turok (now a job title instead of having ever been a guy's name in-universe).
As pointed out a few posts ago, the guy on the box is Joshua Fireseed (sort of dressed up like Tal'Set). Best I can tell, Acclaim figured that this was a good way to promote and capitalize on their upcoming comic series. And yes, the instruction booklet has both Joshua and Tal'Set as main characters. The character of Tal'Set was originally created by Acclaim as an homage to Valiant's character of Turok. Then Seeds of Evil's backstory identified the previous game's protagonist (who was also based off of Valiant's character of Turok) as Tal'Set and an online webcomic produced by Acclaim retold the final boss fight of Dinosaur Hunter from Tal'Set's perspective, and so the two characters (original game Turok and Tal'Set) are now sort of horribly entangled.
