Meave G. Leakey

Meave G. Leakey (born July 28, 1942, London, England) is a British paleoanthropologist who was part of a family that gained renown for decades of pioneering hominin research in eastern Africa.

As a college student, Epps planned to be a marine zoologist, and she earned a B.S. in zoology and marine zoology from the University of North Wales, Bangor. Finding that there was a lack of positions for women on ocean expeditions, she began graduate work in zoology, and from 1965 to 1968 she worked as a zoologist at Tigoni Primate Research Centre outside Nairobi. At the centre, which was administered by Louis Leakey, she conducted doctoral research on the forelimb of modern monkeys, and she obtained a doctorate (1968) in zoology from the University of North Wales. Soon thereafter she joined a team led by Richard Leakey (son of Louis and Mary Douglas Leakey) to explore new fossil sites near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Meave and Richard were married in 1970, and they continued their research in the Lake Turkana area.

In 1989, when Richard shifted his attention to wildlife conservation, Meave became the coordinator of the National Museums of Kenya’s paleontological field research in the Turkana basin. She was also the head of the National Museums’ Division of Paleontology from 1982 to 2001. In 1994 Leakey led a team that discovered the remains of a previously unknown species—Australopithecus anamensis—that was bipedal (walked upright) and, with an age of 4.1 million years, was one of the earliest hominins (modern humans and fossil species more closely related to modern humans than to other living species) then known. One of Leakey’s interests was in examining evidence at research sites to determine how the environment might have influenced hominin evolution, such as the development of bipedalism. In 2001 Meave and colleagues reported on the discovery of a 3.5-million-year-old skull that they determined belonged to a previously unknown hominin genus and species—Kenyanthropus platyops. The find challenged the conventional view that the specimen’s contemporary, A. afarensis, was in the direct ancestral lineage of Homo sapiens. In 2002 Leakey, along with her daughter Louise, was named an explorer in residence by the National Geographic Society.

In 2007 Leakey was a lead author of a study in Nature magazine that went against the prevailing view of the ancestral lineage of Homo sapiens, namely, that the species H. habilis evolved into H. erectus in linear succession. In 2000 the Koobi Fora Research Project, which Leakey and her daughter directed, had found fossil cranial specimens of H. habilis and H. erectus that dated from about 1.5 million years ago in an area east of Lake Turkana. The study suggested that the two species coexisted in the area for about 500,000 years. The discovery helped to show that the evolution of hominins was not as simple as a relatively sparse fossil record might have previously suggested. In addition to authoring many published scientific papers, Leakey was coeditor of The Koobi Fora Research Project, Volume I (1977) and Lothagam: The Dawn of Humanity in Eastern Africa (2003). Her memoir, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, was published in 2020; it was written with her daughter Samira Leakey.