News

We hold in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. We rarely consider just how amazing our teeth are.

Our grants department is already receiving plenty of inquiries and quite a few letters of recommendation for our PhD candidate applicants, so I know there is a lot of grant writing going on around the world right now. While you get those proposals submitted, I thought I would share with you a few pointers.

Humans have an uncanny desire to explore the unknown. I think most of us can recall times where we’ve felt that curiosity to see what’s around that next corner or behind that dark door. Some of us follow that urge even further to go where no man (or woman) has been before, which leads them to some extreme situations.

Territorial boundary patrolling by chimpanzees is a striking example of group-level cooperation displayed by our closest primate relatives.

Marie-Hélène Moncel was awarded a Leakey Foundation research grant during our spring 2016 cycle for her project entitled “Early evidence of Acheulean bifacial technology in Europe. New fieldwork at Notarchirico (Italy).”

Franklin Mosher Baldwin Memorial Fellowships are awarded to graduate students who are from developing countries and would like to pursue training and/or education abroad.

In 1887 M. Eugène Dubois set out to what was then the Dutch East Indies in search of the missing link. More than a century later, Leakey Foundation Grantee Julien Louys followed in Dubois’ footsteps to look for fossils in the caves of Sumatra.

The Leakey Foundation held our spring 2017 granting session on April 29, 2017. Our Board of Trustees unanimously approved thirty research grant proposals for funding.

For more than 3 million years, Selam lay silent and still. Eager to tell her story, the almost perfect fossil skeleton of a 2 1/2 year-old toddler was discovered at Dikika, Ethiopia — and she had a lot to say.

How did humans get to be so smart, and when did this happen? To untangle this question, we need to know more about the intelligence of our human ancestors who lived 1.8 million years ago. It was at this point in time that a new type of stone tool hit the scene and the human brain nearly doubled in size.