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For over 50 years, Born in Great Britain paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey unearthed fossils of our early ancestors in Kenya Turkana basin. His findings have changed the way we think about our origins. Instead of an orderly progression from ape to man, his work suggests several prehuman species living simultaneously. Leakey’s new memoir, The sediments of time: my lifelong search for the past, written in collaboration with his daughter Samira, reflects on his life in science and brings together what we now understand the climatic evolution of our species.
Leakey is part of a famous family of paleoanthropologists. His husband, Richard Leakey and her parents, Louis and Mary, are known for their discoveries of the first hominins.
Meave, 78, is a professor at Stony Brook University, New York and director of field research at the nonTurkana Basin Institute profit, a collaboration between the Leakey family and Stony Brook.
You graduated in the 1960s in zoology and marine zoology from the University of Bangor and foresaw a career as a marine biologist. How did you end up fossil hunting in Africa?
I had written to many marine centers around the world and got the same answer: they didn’t have facilities for a woman on a boat. Fed up, I decided I should try something else. A guy 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 answered. In a few weeks I was on the plane.
I met Richard when I was running the center. I had just earned my doctorate in zoology, studying monkey skeletons. Richard contacted me to talk about how the center was spending too much money and we needed to save. We liked each other and started seeing it quite a bit. He asked me if I wanted to come and work with him at his fossil site. That’s how I got to the Turkana and then to 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 lose the excitement of field work, so both babies were brought to the Turkana a few weeks after their birth. They would stay in base camp with someone to take care of them as we went out and worked. As they grew up, they would occasionally hang out with us.
There is one skull in particular that remains one of my all time favorite fossils, because of the fond memories I have of rebuilding it, with a baby hippo playing in the lake and little Louise playing at my feet in a cool bowl of water. ‘water. It was a very special moment.
In the late 1980s, Richard went to the head of Kenya Wildlife Service and you have taken the lead in the field work. In 1999 your team found the skull of an ancient hominid that was about the same age as the famous one Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), on 3.2mone-year-old fossil skeleton discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. You called him Kenyanthropus platyops: the flat-faced man of Kenya. How has this changed our understanding of evolution?
Lucy got a huge amount of publicity. It has always been projected as the common ancestor of humans. I always thought it made no sense, because if you looked at any other animal lineage 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 it out. But it was clear that it was something completely new and different from Lucy. She lived at the same time as Lucy, but she had this really flat face. The meaning was far-reaching: it showed Lucy he was not necessarily the ancestor of all later hominins.
Your book does not include a family tree of our origins. Was it intentional?
Yes. I tend not to try to draw straight lines between things. There is still a lot to discover. I fear that instead of increasing our understanding, lineage building may only be preliminary and may, in fact, be misleading.
There are periodic attempts to debunk Africa as the “birthplace of humanity”. How have things changed over the course of your career? And East Africa should or Southern Africa, where the earliest hominid fossils were also found in the caves, do you get the nickname?
Early paleontologists did not believe that humans could have come from Africa. There was a biased insistence that humans must have originated in Europe. The work to convince the scientific community and the world was started by my in-laws and continued by my husband, me and my daughter Louise. As I went through my career, it became more and more accepted. Surely Africa is where it all started. The climate and vegetation were just right. And, for me, East Africa is very likely, because if you look at where non-human primates are distributed today, they are concentrated around the tropics and the equator.
How we developed our amazing brain power and our ability to walk on two legs?
Evolution occurs due to habitat change driven by climate change. Driven by a tendency towards drying, 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 reach food – such as berries and fruit on bushes – better and could travel further.
Big brains came later, after bipedalism and increased dexterity. Brains are expensive in terms of calories. To develop a great brain, you need to have a good source of food. When our ancestors began to find a way to hunt and capture a lot of meat, they were able to develop larger brains.
You donated a kidney to Richard, and helped him lose both legs in a plane crash. You think our ancestors formed similar social bonds?
I’m sure. We found a 1.6 million-year-old femur [thigh bone] which was very clearly broken and repaired, and this can only have meant caring for the individual. Otherwise they wouldn’t have made it. The degree of social bond had to be considerable.
Do you keep digging and what would your latest discovery be?
I still go on the pitch, but not so much. Louise and I have a fantastic crew, so we don’t have to be there all the time. We are mainly working on the west side of Lake Turkana, on 4 million year old sites that we worked on decades ago. Fossils deteriorate all the time, so you can find a lot more. Finding a complete skeleton of an early hominid is my dream. We can learn a lot more than from a skull alone.
Are we still evolving?
I don’t think we’re physically evolving yet, because we control our environment so much. And while there is climate change now – meaning we can’t live in the places we live in today – it’s hard to imagine it will affect our physical evolution due to that control. Our technology is evolving fantastically, though. Our evolution today is more technological than morphological.
• The sediments of time: my lifelong search for the past by Meave Leakey is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (£ 23.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Shipping costs may apply
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