News

The Leakey Foundation “Discovering Us” 50th Anniversary Gala included a portrait studio that captured elegant photos of our party guests. Please scroll through the gallery and share your photos on social media!

Rachel Perlman was awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant during our spring 2016 cycle  for her project entitled “The energetics of male reproductive strategies in geladas (Theropithecus gelada).”  Here she updates us on her field work in Ethiopia. 

The question of where we humans come from is one many people ask, and the answer is getting more complicated as new evidence is emerging all the time.

Dr. Erin Vogel is a four-time Leakey Foundation grant recipient who has shared her research with over 250 students through The Leakey Foundation’s classroom visit program.

How and when did music begin? How does the discovery of 40,000-year-old bone flutes impact our understanding of music within the cognitive revolution? This one-hour session will focus on these … Continued

Kelsey Pugh was awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant during our spring 2016 cycle for her project entitled “Mid-Late miocene hominoid phylogeny: Implications for ape and human evolution.”

Most paleontologists track their careers in terms of funding and expedition cycles, searching for fossils in finite windows of time and often spending months, even years waiting to return to promising sites. It is rare that someone is able to devote his or her life to searching for fossils, yet one man has done exactly that. That man is Kamoya Kimeu.

Researchers conducting archaeological fieldwork in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia have discovered a fossilized finger bone of an early member of our species, Homo sapiens. The discovery is the oldest directly dated Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the immediately adjacent Levant, and indicates that early dispersals into Eurasia were more expansive than previously thought.

Did you know that April 8th is the anniversary of The Leakey Foundation’s first board meeting in 1968? This makes for the perfect time to launch festivities for The Leakey Foundation’s 50th anniversary!

Julie Lesnik was awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant during our fall 2015 cycle for her project entitled “An evaluation of termite-associated hydrocarbon signatures as an influence on prey selectivity and an ecological signal for chimpanzees and Olduvai hominins.”