News

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.”

Power. Ambition. Jealousy. According to a new study, the same things that fuel deadly clashes in humans can also tear apart chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives.

The timing, location, and circumstances of the origin of modern humans has long been of interest, and ongoing studies continue to refine our understanding of early modern human evolution. Leakey Foundation grantee Marianne Brasil is a PhD candidate from the University of California at Berkeley who is studying the skeletal morphology of early Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia.

Joel Bray, a graduate student at Arizona State University, is studying the development of male-male social relationships in chimpanzees at Gombe National Park, Tanzania.

Carrie Miller was awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant during our spring 2017 cycle for her project entitled “Does paternity certainty elicit protection and support of offspring by male gelada monkeys?”

Sam Patterson, PhD candidate from Arizona State University, was awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant for the project entitled “Maternal predictors of infant developmental trajectories in olive baboons.”

Over a 16-year period, about half of the orangutans living on the island of Borneo were lost as a result of changes in land cover.