Leakey Foundation celebrates 45 years of research funding

2013 marks the 45th anniversary of The Leakey Foundation, a California-based organisation dedicated to increasing scientific knowledge, education and public understanding of human origins, evolution, behaviour and survival.

Dr Louis Leakey has been widely acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s most eminent anthropologists; a man whose work inspired the formation of The Leakey Foundation.

During a fundraising lecture tour in the United States in the 1960s, Leakey met intellectuals who were fascinated by his work and keen to promote research into human evolution.

Choosing a multidisciplinary approach to the research of human origins, they formed The Leakey Foundation in 1968 to support Louis and Mary Leakey’s fieldwork and research by promising scientists of the day.

For more than a decade after its inception, The Leakey Foundation provided grants that led to discoveries by British anthropologists Louis, Mary and Richard Leakey; American paleoanthropologist Don Johanson and primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas.

Louis and Mary Leakey are most famously known for their fossil discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, which included Australopithecus boisei and Homo habilis, as well as 100 now-extinct animal remains.

Johanson discovered the fossil of a female hominid australopithecine known as “Lucy”. Richard Leakey, son of Louis, with his wife Maeve Epps found prehistoric fossils of Australopithecus anamnesis, which lived about 4-million years ago in Kenya.

Fossey studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda, as chronicled in her book Gorillas in the Mist; Goodall researched chimpanzees in Tanzania and became a Dame of the British Empire (DBE), while Galdikas continues her studies of orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra.

Today, the foundation funds the work of researchers such as Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged, American primatologist Jill Pruetz, American human evolutionary biologist Dan Lieberman, American paleoanthropologist Frederick Grine, Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Sileshi Semaw, Georgian anthropologist and archaeologist David Lordkipanidze and many more.

Since the early 1970s The Leakey Foundation has provided R7,3-million in research funding to South Africa, helping to fund the work of luminaries including palaeoanthropologists Phillip Tobias and Ron Clarke.

Foundation funding continues to support research at famous South African cave sites at Sterkfontein, Sibudu and Swartkrans.