Meave Leakey

Meave ( Epps ) Leakey ( born July 28, 1942 in London ) is considered together with her husband Richard Leakey one of the most important PaläoanthropologInnen the present. She digs and research around Lake Turkana in Kenya for fossil remains of early human ancestors. Meave Leakey discovered in Kanapoi et al, 1994 (Kenya ), the oldest known Australopithecusart ( Australopithecus anamensis ) and 1999 a 3.5 million year old and almost completely preserved skull from the mold circle of australopithecines. It was attributed by her of a new genus and Kenyanthropus platyops named.

Meave Leakey and Richard belong to a dynasty of Urmensch researchers whose first generation of Louis and Mary Leakey were. In the third generation is now also the daughter of Meave and Richard Leakey Louise, active in this field.

Life

Meave Epps was educated as a child in convent schools and boarding schools and studied zoology, in the beginning especially marine biology, through doctoral degree at the University of North Wales, Bangor (1968). For her doctoral thesis on the bones of modern apes she had worked in 1965 at Tigoni Primate Research Centre on the outskirts of Nairobi. The Tigoni Primate Research Center was then under the patronage of Louis Leakey, who has repeatedly encouraged also studying the behavior of apes in addition to his interest in paleontological excavations; he promised himself thereof to draw conclusions about the behavior of the hominids. In Nairobi Meave Epps also got to his son Richard know, who invited her to a field study in the territory of the then newly discovered paleontological excavation site at Lake Turkana in 1969 - this was the beginning of their highly successful scientific work in Kenya, the first primarily the development of Mammals of East Africa was in earlier eras of Earth's history. Only after the plane crash of her husband (1993 ), in which he lost both legs, she devoted herself primarily the hominid fossils.

Since 1969 Meave Leakey works for the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi, from 1982 to 2001 she was Head of the Department of Palaeontology there. Since 1989 she is also the coordinator for the excavations at Lake Turkana. Together with Friedemann Schrenk she is committed to the Uraha Foundation, which among other things the local Kenyan population wants to convey in a museum, which to this day is still almost unknown in Africa, namely, that man has evolved on this continent.

1970 married Meave and Richard Leakey, 1972 was born their daughter Louise, in 1974 their second daughter Samira. Your lectures impress equally through entertaining clarity as technical competence. Together with daughter Louise she still directs the Kenyan excavations at Lake Turkana.

Scientific achievements

As the most important find of Meave Leakey applies in 1999 at Lake Turkana discovered skull of Kenyanthropus platyops ( " flachgesichtiger Kenya man "), which gave rise to far-reaching changes in the scientific conceptions of the early types of Hominini. She pointed their find to the effect that he could be another branch in the family tree of the hominids and have thus lived parallel to Australopithecus afarensis. The classification of the find as a distinct genus was based on the fact that Kenyanthropus features of both Australopithecus and from an early Homo species having, Homo rudolfensis, which lived about 2.5 million years ago in Africa. Or to put it differently: The fossil looks for his age amazingly human, when speaking of his flat face apart again.

As early as 1995 she had drawn attention to himself by a sensational find, as their team at Kanapoi on Lake Turkana (Kenya ) discovered that about 4 million years old fossil remains of Australopithecus anamensis ( Südaffe from the lake ) - a name which so far irritated when only the head apelike, the postcranial skeleton, however, is quite humanoid pronounced. At this Fund - the earliest archaeological Australopithecinenart - was thanks to some shin pieces namely proof must be furnished that the bipedalism of Hominini already at this early time was fully formed and had apparently already developed in a time when these about chimps great individuals still in dense forests lived. The dating is also surprising, as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived according to current estimates, millions of years ago, four to seven, walking upright So therefore, must have one of the very early features of leading people to family tree branch. Previously had about 3.7 million year old fossilized footprints of Laetoli (Tanzania ), the Meave's mother Mary had discovered to be the oldest evidence of bipedalism in force.

Work

• 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.