The Discovery of โZinjโ
On July 17, 1959, Mary Leakey left her camp and went out to search the layers of sediment in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, as she and her husband Louis Leakey had done for almost 30 years. Their primary goal was to find fossils of our human relatives (hominins), and as hot, dusty, backbreaking, painstakingly slow and what many friends and fellow scientists might call impossible as that goal seemed, they were determined to reach it.
Fossil Finders: The Hominid Gang
Kamoya Kimeu may be the most famous โFossil Finderโ in paleoanthropology, but he was not alone when he made many of his remarkable discoveries. With him was a group of men who came to be known as the โHominid Gang.โ Walking and surveying the often inhospitable rocky landscape in East Africa, these men became outstanding and important fossil finders.
Unraveling the Mystery of Human Bipedality
Bipedality, the ability to walk upright on two legs, is a hallmark of human evolution. Many primates can stand up and walk around for short periods of time, but only humans use this posture for their primary mode of locomotion.
Seeing the World Through a Tarsierโs Eyes
Tarsiers are small (tennis ball-sized) nocturnal primates that have the largest eyes relative to body size of any known living or extinct vertebrate. Their enormous eyes are thought to enhance visually-guided predation by increasing visual sensitivity in dim light and contrasting an object of focus with a progressive depth of field.
Motherโs Milk Holds Key to Unlocking an Evolutionary Mystery From the Last Ice Age
As biologists explore the variation across the genomes of living people, theyโve found evidence of evolution at work. Particular variants of genes increase or decrease in populations through time. Sometimes this happens by chance. Other times these changes in frequency result from the geneโs helping or hindering individualsโ survival.