Word: leakey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Meave Leakey, head of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya and a member of the world's most famous fossil-hunting family, suspects the change in climate rewarded bipedalism for a different reason. Yes, the dryer climate made for more grassland, but our early ancestors, she argues, spent much of their time not in dense forest or on the savannah but in an environment with some trees, dense shrubbery and a bit of grass. "And if you're moving into more open country with grasslands and bushes and things like this, and eating a lot of fruits and berries...
...Borneo, a decline of one-third in the same period. "Orangutan survival totally depends on the survival of the tropical forest," says Birute Galdikas. "It's as simple as that." Galdikas has been studying orangutans since the late 1960s, when she was dispatched to Indonesia by Louis Leakey, the world-renowned anthropologist who, along with his wife Mary, laid the foundation for modern theories of human origins. Leakey's two other "angels"?sent out at the same time?were Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. Goodall gained fame for her work with chimpanzees, detailing for the first time intercommunal warfare...
Like other members of the famous "hominid gang," the sharp-eyed fossil hunters employed by paleontology's Leakey family, Justus Erus spends three months a year scouring the dry, bone-rich riverbeds around Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya. It is a scrubby, desolate landscape, where the people are desperately poor and gun-toting young men are a menacing presence. But it is hallowed ground to scientists because of the clues it offers to early human history. Still, even after five years, Erus, a 30-year-old Turkana tribesman, had scored nary a hit--just bits of ancient animal bones...
...gang's explorations in August 1999, at a site called Lomekwi, Erus noticed a white object, just an inch or so across, sticking out of a patch of brown mudstone. "I thought maybe it was [the bones of] a monkey," he says. Beckoning the expedition's co-leader, Meave Leakey, wife and daughter-in-law, respectively, of Richard and Louis Leakey and renowned in her own right, he asked her opinion. By nightfall they realized that they had uncovered the partial remains of a humanlike skull...
...that view is being challenged. The new skull, described by Leakey and six colleagues, including her and Richard's daughter Louise, 29, in Nature last week, pushes the presence of coexisting species back another million years, to between 3.5 million and 3.2 million years ago. That's right in Lucy's time. Yet it is so different from Lucy that they assign their fossil, which they call Kenyanthropus platyops, or "flat-faced man of Kenya," to a new genus, or grouping of species. "This means we will have to rethink the early past of hominid evolution," says Meave Leakey, head...