[ad_1]
For over 50 years, British origin paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey unearthed fossils of our earliest ancestors in Kenya Turkana Basin. His discoveries have changed the way we think about our origins. Instead of an orderly progression from monkey to human, his work suggests different prehuman species living simultaneously. Leakey’s new memories, The sediments of time: my perpetual quest for the past, co-written with his daughter Samira, reflects on his scientific life and reconstructs what we now understand the evolution due to the climate of our species.
Leakey is part of a famous family of paleoanthropologists. Her husband, Richard Leakey and his parents, Louis and Mary, are known for their discoveries of the first hominins.
Meave, 78, is a teacher at Stony Brook University, New York and field research director at the nonprofit Turkana Basin Institute, A collaboration between the Leakey family and Stony Brook.
In the 1960s, you obtained a diploma in zoology and marine zoology from the University of Bangor and consider a career as a marine biologist. How did you end fossil hunting in Africa?
I had written to many marine centers around the world and got the same response: they did not have facilities for a woman on a boat. Fed up, I decided I should try something else. A boyfriend at the time found an ad on the last page of the Times for a research position at the Tigoni Primate Research Center in Kenya. I called the number and Louis Leakey picked up. Within weeks, I was on the plane.
I met Richard when I was running the center. I had just completed my PhD in zoology studying monkey skeletons. Richard contacted me to tell me that the center was spending too much money and that we had to save money. We have it all and I was starting to see it a bit. He asked me if I wanted to come and work with him on his fossil site. This is how I learned about Turkana and the fossils.
You and Richard got married in 1970 and your daughters, Louise and Samira, were born in 1972 and 1974. How did you balance research and motherhood?
I didn’t want to miss the excitement of the fieldwork, so the two children were transported to Turkana a few weeks after their birth. They stayed at base camp with someone to look after them while we went to work. As they got older they come with us from time to time.
There is one skull in particular that remains one of my favorite fossils, because of the happy memories I have of reconstructing it, with a baby hippo playing in the lake and baby Louise playing at my feet in a pond. fresh water. It was a really special moment.
In the late 1980s, Richard went to head Kenya Wildlife Service and you took the lead in the field work. In 1999 your team found the skull of a first hominin that was roughly the same age as the famous Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), 3.2mone year old fossil skeleton discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. You called him Kenyanthropus platyops: the flat-faced man from Kenya. How has it changed our understanding of evolution?
Lucy got huge publicity. She was always projected as the common ancestor of humans. I always thought that didn’t make sense, because if you looked at another animal line, there were always so many species. I thought: there must be diversity [in the early hominins].
When we found this specimen it was crushed and broken so it took a long time to figure out the meaning. But you could tell it was something completely new and different from Lucy. He lived at the same time as Lucy, but had this really flat face. The significance was considerable: she showed Lucy was not necessarily the ancestor of all later hominids.
Your book does not include a family tree of our origins. Was it deliberate?
Yes. I tend not to try to draw straight lines between things. There is still a lot to discover. I fear that instead of adding to our understanding, line building may only be preliminary and may, in fact, be misleading.
There are periodic attempts to demystify Africa as the “cradle of humanity”. How have things changed during your career? And should East Africa or Southern Africa, where the first hominid fossils were also found in caves, get the nickname?
The first paleontologists did not believe that humans could come from Africa. There was a prejudiced insistence that humans must be from Europe. The work to convince the scientific community and the world to the contrary was started by my in-laws and continued by my husband, myself and my daughter Louise. Over the course of my career, it has become more and more accepted. Africa is definitely where it all began. The climate and the vegetation were perfect. And, for me, East Africa is very likely, because if you look at where the non-human primates are distributed today, they are concentrated around the tropics and the equator.
How we evolved our formidable brain power and our ability to walk on two legs?
Evolution occurs due to the change of habitats brought about by climate change. Driven by a tendency to dry out, towards a more open savannah, I suspect that our ancestors began to descend from the trees to the ground. They found that if they stood on two legs, they could better reach food – like berries and fruit on bushes – and they could travel further.
The big brains came later, after bipedalism and increased dexterity. Brains are expensive in terms of calories. To develop a big brain, you need to have a good source of food. When our ancestors started to find a way to hunt and catch a lot of meat, they were able to develop bigger brains.
You donated a kidney to Richard, and helped him lose both legs in a plane crash. Do you think our ancestors formed similar social bonds?
I am on. We found a 1.6 m old femur [thigh bone] it was very clearly broken and fixed, and it can only mean the individual taken care of. Otherwise, they would not have succeeded. The degree of social bond must have been considerable.
Do you still keep digging and what would be your ultimate find?
I always go to the field, but not so much. Louise and I have a great team so we don’t have to be there all the time. We mainly work on the western shore of Lake Turkana, at 4 million year old sites that we were working on decades ago. Fossils are disappearing all the time, so you can find a lot more. Finding a complete skeleton of one of the first hominids is my dream. We can learn much more than from a single skull.
Are we still evolving?
I don’t think we are physically evolving yet because we are in so much control of our environment. And while there is climate change now – meaning we can’t live in places we live in today – it’s hard to imagine that it will affect our physical evolution because of this control. Our technology is evolving in fantastic ways, however. Our evolution is now more technological than morphological.
• The sediments of time: my perpetual quest for the past by Meave Leakey is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (£ 23.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
[ad_2]
Source link