Meave Leakey is a paleoanthropologist and zoologist who was part of the research team that unearthed the "flat-faced man of Kenya," a 3.5 million-year-old skull representing an entirely new branch of the early human family tree.
Leakey is the standard-bearer of a family of paleoanthropologists who have dominated their field since the beginning of the 20th Century.
For seventy years, the Leakeys have been digging in Africa, uncovering fossilized clues to the origins of our earliest ancestors. Dr. Leakey's field and laboratory work have established her as one of the most visible and distinguished scientists in a highly competitive and male-dominated profession.
In 1994, Leakey's field expedition discovered an important piece of the evolutionary puzzle: a new species of hominid, or early human, that began to walk upright at least four million years ago, half a million years earlier than previously thought.
In 1999, her research team, excavating by Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, found a 3.5 million-year-old skull and partial jaw said to belong to a new branch of our early human family. Dr. Leakey named the new genus Kenyanthropus platyops, or flat-faced man of Kenya. This amazing discovery, announced in the journal Nature, has profound implications in understanding the origins of mankind. In its front-page story on March 22, 2001, the New York Times wrote that the discovery "threatens to overturn the prevailing view that a single line of descent streched through the early stages of human anscestry."
Dr. Leakey's research also includes the evolution of monkeys, apes, carnivores, and mammalian faunas. She has written more than fifty scientific articles and her lectures are known to be as enjoyable as they are informative. A masterful storyteller, she combines scientific observations with real-life tales of her fieldwork in Africa.
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