News

A new discovery, funded in part by The Leakey Foundation, helps date the transatlantic migration of primates to about 34 million years ago, around the time a major drop in sea level would have made the ocean voyage shorter.

Dozens of non-human primate species, including our closest relatives, are at risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection and are vulnerable to COVID-19, which could have devastating impacts on populations of primates that are already endangered.

Join us on Friday, April 10 at 5 pm CST/GMT-5 (2 pm Pacific) to hear Natalia Camargo discuss her experience studying chimpanzees in Kibale National Park for the past year.

Deep in the remote forests of Indonesian Borneo lives a society of hunter-gatherers who speak a language never before shared with outsiders. Until now. The latest episode of Origin Stories tells the story of the Cave Punan people and their urgent plea for help to save their forest home.

Nearly 2 million years ago, three hominin genera – Australopithecus, Paranthropus and the earliest Homo erectus lineage – lived as contemporaries in the karst landscape of what is now South Africa, according to a new geochronological evaluation of the hominin fossil-rich Drimolen Paleocave complex.

Science is a collaborative endeavor and long-term projects require the work of multiple generations of researchers. At the 2019 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, The Leakey Foundation set out to document the academic “families” of biological anthropology. All of the portraits are now available on our website.

New findings by Leakey Foundation grantees reveal the slowing down of brain development in our ape-like ancestors began more than three million-years-ago.

An important advancement in human evolution studies has been achieved after scientists retrieved the oldest human genetic data set from an 800,000-year-old tooth belonging to the hominin species Homo antecessor.

Harmonie Klein is a PhD candidate studying hunting and meat sharing among wild chimpanzees in Gabon. This community of chimpanzees is newly habituated to human presence and Klein is learning a lot about their cooperative behaviors.

Chimps are unusual among mammals in that daughters, not sons, typically pick up their roots at puberty and move away from their families. But in Gombe National Park, some chimpanzee females stay put instead of moving out.