Paleontologist and zoologist Meave Leakey is the standard- bearer of a distinguished family of paleoanthropologists who have dominated their field since the beginning of the 20th century. Her life-long search for clues about our past has led her to every corner of the remote, windswept semi-deserts of Kenya’s Lake Turkana Basin. Over the last four decades, the Koobi Fora Research Project, which she currently co-directs with her eldest daughter Louise, has unearthed much of the evidence behind our current understanding of our past.
Dr. Leakey is presently focusing on the origins of our own genus, Homo, and the emergence of Homo erectus, the first human ancestor to move out of Africa. In 1999, 2000 and again in 2007 the project made sensational new discoveries of early Homo that, as National Geographic put it, “challenge the straight-line story of human evolution.” The announcement of these discoveries was featured in Nature and The New York Times.
Leakey is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence in recognition of the 50-year relationship between “the National Geographic Society and the Leakey family dynasty of pioneering fossil hunters.” She is also a Research Professor at Stony Brook University and a Research Associate of the National Museums of Kenya. A masterful storyteller, Dr. Leakey conveys the importance of studying our origins in the context of the modern world with vivid images, real-life stories and provocative questions.
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Zoologist