Distinguished paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey will speak at Yale Law School’s Levinson Auditorium on Wednesday, March 24, at 5:00 p.m. A reception will follow.
The talk, the First Annual Yale Peabody Museum Distinguished Lecture, is titled “Human Origins: New Discoveries in East Africa.” It celebrates the opening of the Yale Peabody Museum’s newest exhibition Fossil Fragments: The Riddle of Human Origins, opening the same day. Dr. Leakey participated in the planning of the exhibition.
A research associate at the National Museums of Kenya and adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, she was recently named a National Geographic “explorer in residence.” She is an active promoter of hominid research in the field, laboratory and classroom. Author of numerous scientific articles, her research also includes the evolution of monkeys, apes, carnivores, and other mammalian fauna.
Continuing the legacy of her famous family of paleoanthropolgists, Dr. Leakey’s research has made major contributions to the study of human origins. She took over the leadership of the extensive excavations at Lake Turkana in Kenya when her husband, Richard Leakey, gave up active paleoanthropological research. Her 1999 discovery and description of a new hominid, Kenyanthropus platyops, radically changed scientists’ views on the origins of humans. A front-page story in The New York Times represented the discovery of this 3.5 million-year-old skull and partial jaw as threatening to overturn the prevailing view that a single line of descent stretched through the early stages of human ancestry.
The talk and reception are free and open to the public. Levinson Auditorium is located at 127 Wall Street, New Haven. For more information, please email David Heiser at peabody.events@yale.edu.
