Provost Lecture: Louise Leakey - A Search for Human Origins at Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya

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• published: 28 Oct 2010
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Third-generation Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louise Leakey represents the future of the Leakey family's legacy in the field of human origins research through her ongoing work in the Turkana Basin region in northern Kenya. As Director of Public Education and Outreach at the Turkana Basin Institute she is instrumental in developing the multi-disciplinary research center best known for its human origins research. Dr. Martin, who also serves as Director of the Turkana Basin Institute, introduced Leakey, tracing his work with her and her father Richard to 1979. He said that in addition to being a "fine anthropologist," she is also a great bush pilot and someone who can be counted upon to ensure that electrical, plumbing, and computer services are all operational in this remote region of the world. She began her lecture at the well-attended Charles B. Wang Theater by saying how fortunate she was to be brought up in Kenya, fitting fossil bones together like jig saw puzzles and speculated that perhaps her two daughters might represent the fourth generation of Leakeys to conduct human origins research. She drew laughs when she asked how we evolved from quadruped to bipedal ape, with the accompanying slide showing modern man evolving back into a hominid hunched over a computer. She referred to the Turkana Basin as the best laboratory of its kind today and one that stretches back to the late Cretaceous Period, and not just in terms of human origins but also crocodiles, pigs, elephants, hippos, and even an animal that appeared to be a combination of a rhinoceros and a horse. Leakey said she is grateful to be instrumental in putting Kenya and Africa back on the map in establishing infrastructure there. She described the Great Rift Valley considered by many experts to be the cradle of humanity, as 160 miles long, and rife with a diversity of fish, insects, birds, and traditional people. She showed slides of the many buildings recently built that are housing conferences and research facilities for the Stony Brook University five-course, 15-credit undergraduate program available from January to March that features archeology, paleontology, physical anthropology, and geology. Slides of her digging in Kenyan caves with her mother elicited the remark that she is glad she didn't have to do this kind of work today because it is so much more difficult than the current method used by teams of researchers who comb the Turkana Basin looking for fossil remains and using strainer screens to separate sediment from bones. She showed "prep" labs where members of the local community are employed to examine fossil findings through microscopes and Nature magazines featuring some of these discoveries in a collage of cover articles. Then she posed the big question — "What makes us so special as a species? Are we a super-intelligent upright ape or a polluting creature?" She said that Homo Erectus might have been the first ancestor to walk out of Africa 1.8 million years ago, giving all of us a common African ancestory. Then she addressed the fact that skin color is related to protection from the sun and prevention from losing Vitamin D, a key factor in calcium retention and bone production. She urged the audience to consider the "tiny window of time" humanity has been a planet inhabitant (first homo sapiens for 200,000 years), for a mere fraction of earth's history (roughly 4.5 billions years). She said that we should have experienced another Ice Age but that probably won't happen as long as we are around because the carbon dioxide levels have risen to an alarming rate affecting nearly every ecosystem on earth, which has begun to change our water cycles. We have interrupted the flow of every river in the world with the creation of reservoirs and our dependence upon oil has soared to 31-billion barrels a year. She also cited that 30,000 species a year are now disappearing at the height of the Age of Man. Mountain gorillas, elephants, and sharks are some of the species that are being seriously threatened as we harvest them for their by-products. Twenty-six million tons of trash is dumped into the oceans annually, Leakey said. As the lecture drew to a close the slide appeared on the screen bearing a Chinese proverb, "Unless we change our direction we are heading we might end up where we are going."