News

Most mammals rely on scent rather than sight. Look at a dog’s eyes, for example: they’re usually on the sides of its face, not close together and forward-facing like ours. Having eyes on the side is good for creating a broad field of vision, but bad for depth perception and accurately judging distances in front.

The course of dinosaur evolution in Africa has largely remained a mystery. But in the Sahara Desert of Egypt, scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur that helps fill in some gaps in the fossil record of dinosaurs in Africa: Mansourasaurus shahinae, a school-bus-length, long-necked plant-eater with bony plates embedded in its skin.

Hilary Duke was awarded a Leakey Foundation Research Grant in the fall of 2016 for her project entitled “Taking shape: Investigating the earliest Acheulean at Kokiselei, Kenya (1.8-1.76Ma).” Last year we shared a summary of her work. Here she updates us on her progress!  

A jawbone complete with teeth recently discovered by at Israel’s Misliya cave has now been dated to 177,000-194,000 years ago. The finding indicates that modern humans were present in the Levant at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.

New fossil finds over the past few years have been forcing anthropologists to reexamine our evolutionary path to becoming human. Now the earliest modern human fossil ever found outside the continent of Africa is pushing back the date for when our ancestors left Africa.

With funding from The Leakey Foundation, a team of scientists has made fascinating new discoveries that shed light on the origins and evolution of Neanderthals.

For more than four years, the alpha male in the Mitumba community of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park has been Edgar, a ruler with an iron fist if ever there was one. 

Save the Date for The Leakey Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala!

The celebration will take place on Thursday, May 3, 2018, at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco and we invite you to join us to celebrate 50 years of exploring, discovering, and sharing the human story.

The Leakey Foundation held our fall 2017 granting session on December 2, 2017. Our Board of Trustees unanimously approved twenty-three research grant proposals for funding.

Thomas Plummer is a professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York, and a member of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology. He was awarded a Leakey Foundation research grant in our spring 2017 cycle for his project entitled “Excavation of ca. 2.6 Ma Oldowan sites at Nyayanga, Kenya.”