The mission of the Leakey Foundation is to increase scientific knowledge and public understanding of human origins and evolution.

2002 Paleoanthropology Field School in South Africa!! | SCIENCE | MEMBERSHIP | ACTIVITIES & EVENTS | NEWSLETTER | PHOTOGRAPHY | MERCHANDISE | IHO PERSONNEL | The Institute of Human Origins, a non-profit, multidisciplinary research organization affiliated with Arizona State University, is dedicated to the recovery and analysis of the fossil evidence for human evolution. IHO seeks to provide a ...

The twenty most influential scientists and thinkers of the 20th century.

The Leakey family When Louis Leakey and Mary Nicol first met, he asked her to help with illustrations for his upcoming (1934) book Adam's Ancestors: An Up-to-Date Outline of What is Known about the Origin of Man. Within a few years they were married. They and their children (especially Richard and his wife Meave) became known as the first family of paleontology. Louis Leakey was born in 1903 in ...

Biographies: Robert Broom Robert Broom was born in Scotland in 1866 to a poor family. Educated as a doctor specializing in midwifery, he used that profession to support himself while travelling the world. Fascinated by the origin of the mammals, he travelled to Australia in 1892. Five years later, he went to South Africa, where he would stay for the rest of his life. In 1910 Broom's insistence ...

Biographies: Davidson Black Davidson Black was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1884. As a boy he became an expert canoeist, and while still in school spent his summers carrying supplies long distances by canoe for the Hudson Bay Company. He also befriended Indians and learned their language. Black gained a degree in medical science in 1906, went back to school to study comparative anatomy, and began ...

In the year 1887 a young Dutchman named Eugene Dubois left the Netherlands on a ship bound for the East Indies. Born in 1858, Dubois had spent seven years studying medicine at the University of Amsterdam before taking up a teaching post there. His chief interest. however, was the evolution theory which had been proposed by Charles Darwin some years earlier. Convinced that the most likely places ...

Was Java Man a gibbon In a word: No. Gibbon skulls have an average cranial capacity of about 100 cc. The Java Man skullcap was about 940 cc, considerably larger than even the largest gorilla skulls, which are over 700 cc. Such rough similarity of shape as exists between gibbons and Java Man is common to many apes and hominids. The Java Man skull closely resembles other Homo erectus skulls, and ...