Kamoya Kimeu

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The lower jaw (“Peninj mandible”) of a Paranthropus boisei discovered by Kimeu

Kamoya "Mac" Kimeu (* around 1940) is a Kenyan paleoanthropologist and the assistant to Louis Leakey . He was involved in the discovery of numerous fossils of early ancestors of modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) in Kenya and Tanzania .

His career began in the early 1960s when Louis Leakey put together a team of local helpers who were trained to discover fossils that had been eroded from the ground. This team was the unofficial name "Hominid Gang" ( hominid -speed) due to the sought fossils and the reliability with which this group - was its director and instructors Kimeu - sought and found a substantial number of residues that are of central interest for the Study of the family tree of the human species was. In 1964, this included the so-called “Peninj mandible”, a lower jaw of Paranthropus boisei (see illustration), from whose construction Louis Lekey deduced that this species - contrary to what was assumed at the time - does not belong to the direct ancestors of humans. In 1973 he discovered the most complete skull of Homo habilis to date , the fossil KNM-ER 1813. Kimeu later continued his work under Richard Leakey and in 1984 discovered the first fragment of the Nariokotome boy , the almost complete skeleton of a death probably around 8- to 9-year-old Homo erectus , whose age has been dated to around 1.5 million years. A year earlier he had discovered the 1.7 million year old female skeleton KNM-ER 1808 of a Homo erectus , which showed the types of bone malformations typical of hypervitaminosis A , probably caused by the consumption of extremely large amounts of liver.

From 1977 he was the curator of the National Museums of Kenya responsible for the collections from the Kenyan fossil sites.

The National Geographic Society awarded him the John Oliver LaGorce Medal in 1985 . a. the polar explorer Robert Peary and the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart had received; the medal was presented to him by US President Ronald Reagan in the White House , "which was not a bad compliment for an autodidact, the son of a M'kamba small farmer."

A genus and a species of primates was also named in his honor: Kamoyapithecus hamiltoni and Cercopithecoides kimeui .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alan Walker , Michael R. Zimmerman and Richard Leakey : A possible case of hypervitaminosis A in Homo erectus. In: Nature. Volume 296, 1982, pp. 248-250, doi: 10.1038 / 296248a0
  2. ↑ Alan Walker and Pat Shipman: Turkana Boy. In search of the first person. Galila Verlag, Etsdorf am Kamp 2011, p. 17, ISBN 978-3-902533-77-7
personal data
SURNAME Kimeu, Kamoya
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mac (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kenyan anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH around 1940