Word: leakey
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...less than a year later, another team of paleontologists, led by Meave Leakey from the National Museums of Kenya and Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University, has announced the best evidence so far that a previously unknown species of hominid strode upright at least 4 million years ago. Their find, reported in last week's Nature, consists of complete upper and lower jaws, teeth from several individuals, a piece of skull, arm bones and a leg bone. Taken together, the fossils push the emergence of two-legged walking, or bipedalism, 500,000 years earlier than any other data had indicated...
Scientists have been scouring the African continent for fossils from the earliest humans ever since 1871, when Charles Dar win first proposed that people and apes had a common ancestor. Kanapoi and Allia Bay, the sites where Leakey and Walker made their discoveries, lie about a day's drive north of Nairobi along the shores of Lake Turkana in the East African Rift Valley. An 1,800-mile-long gash in the surface of the earth, the Rift has yielded many important clues to early human history, because of its unique geology. Layers of sediment preserved animal specimens, while...
...discovery, which Leakey and Walker have named Australopithecus anamensis (anam is the Turkana word for lake), is yet another reason why paleontologists are reconsidering some of their ideas about why the earliest humans stood up. According to one theory, as a change in climate transformed Africa's moist forests into drier grasslands, evolution favored hom inids that could stand upright in order to spot predators lurking in the tall grasses. Other researchers argue that an upright posture lessened the heat the animals absorbed from the fierce tropical sun. Still others believe bipedalism freed the hands for carrying food or children...
...leakey family again finds itself back in a familiar place: the headlines. Not only did Meave Leakey draw worldwide attention last week for her latest discovery of hom inid fossils, but in addition her husband Richard, trying to address an opposition political rally in the Kenyan town of Nakuru two weeks ago, was among a group beaten by a mob wielding ax handles and whips. As Virginia Morell shows in Ancestral Passions, her splendid new collective biography of the Leakey family (Simon & Schuster; $30), this is no surprise; Leakeys have been prominent and colorful figures in paleontology and Kenyan affairs...
...patriarch of the scientific clan was the larger-than-life Louis. Born in Kenya's highlands in 1903, the son of British missionaries, he grew up speaking Kikuyu with his friends and feeling more African than European. While doing research at Cambridge, he precipitated the first of many Leakey scandals. He deserted his first wife and two young children to marry artist and archaeologist Mary Nicol. He was also unable to document fully some of his early fossil claims. Undeterred, he returned to Kenya to vindicate himself...