Meave Leakey to Speak at UMaine Oct. 7
Contact: Media contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — Renowned paleoanthropologist and zoologist Meave Leakey will present a lecture, “African Origins: Sole Survivors of a Diverse Past,” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 7 at the University of Maine. The event is scheduled for Hutchins Concert Hall at the Maine Center for the Arts and is hosted by the Friends of the Hudson Museum and the Maine Center for the Arts.
Leakey, a native of England who is a research associate in the Paleontology Division of the National Museum of Kenya, was recently named a National Geographic “explorer in residence.”
Meave Leakey and other members of her family have been among the primary practitioners of paleoanthropology since the beginning of the last century. Her in-laws, Louis and Mary Leakey, and her husband, Richard Leakey, are also among the best-known scientists in the field. Since 1968, much of the work conducted by Meave Leakey and others in her family has focused on Koobi Fora on the eastern shore of Kenya’s Lake Turkana.
Known as the Turkana Basin Research Project, this work has yielded findings that have altered understanding of the origin of the human species. In 1999, Meave Leakey’s research team discovered a 3.5 million-year-old skull from a hominid believed to be a human ancestor. This find cast doubts on the previous theory that the 3-million-year-old fossil, “Lucy,” discovered in 1974, represented the only line of human ancestry. Leakey’s revolutionary discovery opened the possibility that humans evolved from more than one species
“Meave Leakey represents and exciting school of thought in the field of paleoanthropology,” says Gretchen Faulkner, acting director of UMaine’s Hudson Museum. “She makes a persuasive case for the re-examination of long-held beliefs regarding the unilinear evolution of the human species.”
Tickets to the lecture are free, but they must be obtained in advance from the Maine Center for the Arts box office. The telephone number is (207) 581-1755.
The lecture is supported by the Hudson Museum, the Hudson Museum Friends, Maine Center for the Arts, Anthropology Department, the Climate Change Institute, Women in the Curriculum, Office of the Dean of Student and Community Life, and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Williams.