News

The 88th Annual Meeting of American Association of Physical Anthropologists will be held March 27-30, 2019, in Cleveland, Ohio. Several Leakey Foundation staff members will be attending the meeting to share information about our grant programs, and more.

Sofya Dolotovskaya spent 14 months studying elusive titi monkeys in the Peruvian Amazon. Her Leakey Foundation funded research investigates aspects of pair-living in socially monogamous titi monkeys to see if social monogamy translates into genetic monogamy.

In this never-before-released archival lecture from 1980, Maasai warrior, author, and Leakey Foundation grantee Tepilit Ole Saitoti discusses the Maasai culture and the challenges facing the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania.

Chimpanzees have a more elaborate and diversified material culture than any other nonhuman primate. Researchers have discovered new behaviors in a wild population of chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of Congo. These behaviors include the use of tools to harvest ants and stingless bees.

Upright walking is a trait that defines our human lineage. New research funded in part by The Leakey Foundation provides evidence for greater reliance on terrestrial bipedalism by a human ancestor than previously suggested in the ancient fossil record.

Leakey Foundation grantee Deming Yang has recently returned from his data collection trips to the Turkana Basin in northern Kenya and Salt Lake City, Utah. One of the questions his dissertation research project hopes to address is how the paleoenvironments in the Turkana Basin varied across space and time.

How, when, and why did pair-bonding and monogamy evolve in our human lineage? Leakey Foundation grantee Alba García de la Chica is a PhD candidate from the University of Barcelona. She was awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant in fall 2017 to study the mechanisms that allow the maintenance of pair bonds and monogamy in owl monkeys.

We know that some modern human genomes contain fragments of DNA from an ancient population of humans called Denisovans, the remains of which have been found at only one site, a cave in what is now Siberia. Two recent papers published in Nature give us a firmer understanding of when these little-known archaic hominins lived.

An extinct branch of hominins called the Denisovans is one of the most elusive members of our extended family tree: So far there have been only four individuals found in a single Siberian cave. Now researchers have done the painstaking work of dating the fossils, sediments, and artifacts found in that famous cave, including what might be the first evidence for crafts made by our long-lost cousins.

Our microbiome, the complex community of bacteria, fungi, parasites, and other microorganisms in and on our bodies, reflects the way we live. Most microbiome analyses have focused on people living in developed nations, but in the last several years, scientists have begun to investigate whether people in non-industrialized societies possess distinctly different microbiomes and, if so, what factors shape those differences.