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If you are in New York, the best way to join us for “Our Tribal Nature: Tribalism, Politics, and Evolution” is to purchase one of the few remaining tickets and watch it live at the Morgan Library. If you can’t make it in person, you can watch via livestream on our YouTube channel or Facebook page!

Join us on September 19 at the Morgan Library in New York to examine the evolutionary origins and function of tribalism, our social transition from tribes to states, and the role tribal identity plays in our increasingly divided world.

At a moment when society feels dangerously polarized, fragmented and unstable, the symposium “Our Tribal Nature: Tribalism, Politics, and Evolution” offers a forum for understanding our human urge to form alliances.

Leakey Foundation grantee Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie and his team of researchers have discovered a “remarkably complete” cranium of a 3.8-million-year-old early human ancestor from the Woranso-Mille paleontological site, located in the Afar region of Ethiopia.

Rusinga Island, Kenya, is a fossil site that preserves everything from the smallest rodents to the largest elephants, from insects and snails to leaves and fruits. Leakey Foundation grantee Lauren Michel sends a report on some surprising recent discoveries.

The Leakey Foundation launched a fundraising campaign in honor of Louis Leakey’s 116th birthday on August 7, 2019. All donations up to $5,000 were quadruple-matched thanks to Leakey Foundation Fellow Mike Smith and two anonymous supporters. We are thrilled to report that thanks to your generous donations, we have raised a total of $29,552 for research and educational outreach!

The spinal column is a critical region for understanding the evolution of bipedal walking because the joints between the vertebrae are involved in back movements and the formation of the lumbar lordosis, a curve in the lower back that allows humans to walk upright. New Leakey Foundation-supported research shows that early hominins grew their spinal columns like modern humans.

In the final installment of our “From the Archive” series, Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey shares the story of his life and work in a never-before-released interview recorded in 1969.

Louis Leakey was born on this day in 1903. He was a charismatic scientist who devoted his life to uncovering our shared past and telling our shared story.

Leakey Foundation grantee Stephanie Musgrave has been in the field with the Goualougo Triangle Ape Project in the Republic of the Congo where she studies how the chimpanzees there make and use tools to gather termites and other resources such as ants, honey, seeds, and marrow.