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October 2001
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Meet Kenya Man
By Karen E. Lange
Ten years of searching the scrubby badlands west of Kenya's Lake Turkana had produced a trove of discoveries, but the grand prize—a hominid skull—still eluded them. With the 1999 field season almost over, Meave Leakey moved her team of fossil hunters to a new part of the ancient landscape. On the second day, after several hours of walking bent over, eyes searching the pebble-strewn ground, team member Justus Erus spotted a fossil poking out of the dirt. He said to himself, Could it be a monkey? Leakey knew at once it was a hominid, one of humankind's bipedal predecessors. She knelt down and began teasing bits of bone from the hard clay. Hours passed, and still she continued to excavate in the 110°F (43°C) heat. It took several days to collect the fossil and transport it to a lab in Nairobi. A year and a half later, after the rock had been removed and all but the smallest, bread-crumb-size fragments fitted back together, the resulting skull shook the human family tree.
"It spoils the easy straight-line picture of the past," Leakey says. "We have to rethink some theories." Until the discovery of Kenyanthropus platyops there had been just one group of candidates for humankind's ancestor between four and three million years ago—members of the genus Australopithecus, most notably A. afarensis, made famous by the fossil skeleton called Lucy. But K. platyops, dated at 3.5 to 3.2 million years old, is different enough from afarensis to arguably be classed as a new genus. Yet like Lucy it possesses traits that suggest it could have given rise to Homo, the human line.
For decades Leakey worked happily in near anonymity beside her better known husband, Richard, studying fossil monkeys and carnivores while he dealt with more glamorous hominids. "Richard was the person in the limelight," she says. "I liked it that way." Yet in 1989 she took over Richard's fieldwork. "The fame is a bit of a nuisance," she says. "But it's important the team knows the world is looking on." Asked what sets her apart from others in the field, she says only, "Having a good site and an excellent team."
"Meave is overly modest," says Donald Johanson, Lucy's discoverer, who calls Leakey "the embodiment of paleoanthropology." He and other colleagues attribute Leakey's success to hard work, patience, thoroughness, and determination. "She just goes back and goes back and goes back," says Frank Brown, a geologist on her team. "I asked her why she kept looking in the same place, and she said, 'Fossil hominids have been collected here, and I can't believe all of them have been found.'"
Hominid remains make up less than one-thousandth of the fossil record found around Lake Turkana. In between such rare finds Leakey, initially trained as a zoologist, focuses her enthusiasm on animals that lived with humankind's ancestors. "When fossil hunters find something—even if it's not hominid—she's always excited," says Patrick Gathogo, a Kenyan graduate student who got his start volunteering for Leakey. "She's interested in everything because it relates to the whole story."
K. platyops shows that humans evolved through the same process as other animals, Leakey says. A novel adaptation (walking on two legs) produced a bloom of species—A. afarensis, K. platyops, and others Leakey expects will eventually be found.
"It's important to know that we're the sole remaining species," she says. "We're one little twig left on the past's complicated tree."
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