Leakey Foundation grantees elected to National Academy of Sciences
Three Leakey Foundation grantees were inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on April 25, 2025. Membership in the Academy is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
Stand up for science
At The Leakey Foundation, we believe that science matters and science is for everyone. We also know that understanding our past is a key to a better future.
Lucy, the iconic ancestor
Fifty years since the discovery of Lucy, what does this iconic fossil tell us about our evolutionary story?
By Evan HadinghamAuthor of Discovering Us
What marked out our ancestors from other early apes and set them on the evolutionary path to becoming Homo sapiens? At the start of the 20th century, many assumed that intelligence and a big brain were
Lucy, discovered 50 years ago in Ethiopia, stood just 3.5 feet tall − but she still towers over our understanding of human origins
In 1974, on a survey in Hadar in the remote badlands of Ethiopia, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray found a piece of an elbow joint jutting from the dirt in a gully. It proved to be the first of 47 bones of a single individual – an early human ancestor whom Johanson nicknamed “Lucy.”
Underwater caves yield new clues about Sicily’s first residents
How and when did people first come to Sicily? Scientists exploring coastal and underwater caves discover clues about Sicily's first settlers.