Meave Leakey

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Meave Leakey (2014)

Meave G. (Epps) Leakey (born July 28, 1942 in London ), along with her husband Richard Leakey, are considered to be one of the most important paleoanthropologists of our time. She digs and researches around Lake Turkana in Kenya for fossil remains of early human ancestors. Meave Leakey discovered the oldest Australopithecus species ( Australopithecus anamensis ) in Kanapoi (Kenya) in 1994 and a 3.5 million year old and almost completely preserved skull from the Australopithecine species in 1999 . It was attributed to a new genus by her and Kenyanthropus platyops named.

Richard and Meave Leakey belong to a dynasty of prehistoric researchers whose first generation were Louis and Mary Leakey . Meave and Richard's daughter, Louise Leakey , is now in the third generation in this field.

Life

Meave Epps was brought up as a child in convent schools and boarding schools and studied zoology , initially especially marine biology , up to the doctor's examination at the University of North Wales in Bangor (1968). For her doctoral thesis on the bones of modern monkeys, she worked in 1965 at the Tigoni Primate Research Center just outside Nairobi . The Tigoni Primate Research Center was under the patronage of Louis Leakey , who, in addition to his interest in paleontological excavations, had repeatedly encouraged the study of the behavior of great apes; he promised to be able to draw conclusions from this about the behavior of the pre-humans. In Nairobi, Meave Epps also met his son Richard, who invited her in 1969 to a field study in the area of ​​a then newly discovered paleontological excavation site on Lake Turkana - this was the beginning of her extremely successful scientific work in Kenya, which initially focused on the development of the Mammals of East Africa in earlier epochs of geological history was considered. Only after her husband's plane crash (1993), in which he lost both legs, did she focus primarily on hominid fossils.

Meave Leakey has been working for the Kenyan National Museum in Nairobi since 1969, where she was head of the paleontology department from 1982 to 2001 . Since 1989 she has also been the coordinator for the excavations on Lake Turkana. Together with Friedemann Schrenk , she is committed to the Uraha Foundation, which u. a. wants to convey to the local Kenyan population in a museum what is still almost unknown in Africa to this day: that man has developed on this continent.

Leakey was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2017 .

In 1970 Meave and Richard Leakey married , in 1972 their daughter Louise was born, in 1974 their second daughter Samira. Your presentations are equally impressive due to their entertaining clarity and technical competence. Together with her daughter Louise, she still directs the Kenyan excavations on Lake Turkana.

Scientific achievements

The most important find by Meave Leakey is the skull of Kenyanthropus platyops ("flat-faced Kenyan man"), discovered in 1999 at Lake Turkana , which gave rise to far-reaching changes in scientific beliefs about the early species of hominini . She interpreted her find to the effect that it could be another branch in the family tree of the pre-humans and thus lived parallel to Australopithecus afarensis . The classification of the find as a special genus was justified by the fact that Kenyanthropus had characteristics of Australopithecus as well as of an early Homo species, Homo rudolfensis , which lived in Africa around 2.5 million years ago. In other words: the fossil looks amazingly human for its age, apart from its flat face.

She had already drawn attention to herself in 1995 with a sensational find when her team at Kanapoi on Lake Turkana (Kenya) discovered the approx. 4 million year old fossil remains of an Australopithecus anamensis ( southern monkey from the lake ) - a name that insofar as it does irritated when only the head is ape-like, the postcranial skeleton, on the other hand, is already quite human-like. With this find - the oldest Australopithecine species to date - it was possible to provide evidence , thanks to a few pieces of tibia , that the upright gait of the hominini was already fully developed at this early time and had evidently developed at a time when these chimpanzee-sized individuals were still in dense forests lived. The dating is also surprising insofar as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived four to seven million years ago, according to current estimates, so the upright walk must have been one of the very early peculiarities of the family tree branch leading to humans. Previously, the approximately 3.7 million year old fossilized footprints from Laetoli, Tanzania, discovered by Meave's mother-in-law Mary , were considered the oldest evidence of an upright gait.

Works

  • Meave G. Leakey et al .: New four-million-year old hominid species from Kanapoi and Allia bay, Kenya. In: Nature . Volume 376, 1995, pp. 565-571, doi: 10.1038 / 376565a0 , full text (PDF) ( Memento from July 22, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  • Meave G. Leakey et al .: New hominin genus from eastern Africa shows diverse middle Pliocene lineages. In: Nature. Volume 410, 2001, pp. 433-440, doi: 10.1038 / 35068500
  • as ed. with John M. Harris: Lothagam: The Dawn of Humanity in Eastern Africa. Columbia University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 0-231-11870-8

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Leakey, Meave
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leaky, Meave Epps; Leaky, Meave G.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH London