News

An interdisciplinary team has sequenced and analyzed the oldest ancient DNA from Africa. This new research gives insights into the lives, movements, and relations of people who lived in Africa between 18,000 and 5,000 years ago.

Dr. Liran Samuni has been awarded The Leakey Foundation’s 2021 Gordon P. Getty Grant. This award honors scientists whose multidisciplinary research significantly advances science related to human origins, evolution, behavior, and survival.

We are pleased to announce the recipients of our fall 2021 Leakey Foundation Research Grants. These 39 scientists embody our mission of increasing scientific knowledge and public understanding of human evolution, behavior, and survival.

Paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Erskine Frere Leakey, whose discoveries helped show that humankind evolved in Africa, died on January 2, 2022, at age 77.

Origin Stories podcast turned six years old in 2021! We produced 10 episodes and reached several important milestones this year. Here’s a look back at our year in podcasting.

Human origins research is powered by donors like you.

This December, your donation to The Leakey Foundation will be quadruple-matched thanks to Jorge and Ann Leis and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.

s ago an ancient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, lived in what is today South Africa, near a cave called Malapa that’s a part of the Cradle of Humankind. Until recently, it was not clear how much the species spent climbing in trees and walking on two legs on the ground.

The oldest unequivocal evidence of upright walking in the human lineage are footprints discovered at Laetoli, Tanzania in 1978, by paleontologist Mary Leakey and her team. The bipedal trackways date to 3.7 million years ago. Another set of mysterious footprints was partially excavated at nearby Site A in 1976 but dismissed as possibly being made by a bear. A recent re-excavation of the Site A footprints at Laetoli and a detailed comparative analysis reveal that the footprints were made by an early human

Sebastián Ramírez Amaya is a PhD candidate who is studying chimpanzees in Uganda in order to learn about the evolution of pair-bonding in humans.

Tessa Cicak is a PhD candidate studying whose research is testing ideas about how primates respond to competition over food resources.