News

New research reveals fossil footprints that record two different species of hominins walking along the same Kenyan lakeshore at the same time, roughly 1.5 million years ago.

Looking for a new podcast? Executive Director Sharal Camisa Smith recommends Origin Stories episodes on music, food, and family dynamics.

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 … Continued

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.”

Stephen Magohe is a geologist and assistant lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam who is pursuing his PhD at the University of Calgary. In 2024, Magohe received a prestigious Francis H. Brown African Scholarship for his project “Investigating early Homo habitat through geoscience at Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania.”

How and when did people first come to Sicily? Scientists exploring coastal and underwater caves discover clues about Sicily’s first settlers.

New research in Nature solves the mystery of the origins of the Stonehenge Altar Stone, an enigmatic rock at the heart of the monument.

Learn about Margaret Furtner, a Leakey Foundation grantee using new technology to explore for fossil sites in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind.

Celebrate World Gorilla Day with a never-before-seen lecture by Dian Fossey recorded at the Louis Leakey Memorial Symposium in 1973.

Learn about the Kakamega Monkey Project, one of the longest continuous studies of wild primates in the world.