Louise Leakey
Louise Leakey (born 21 March 1972) is a Kenyan paleontologist. She does research and field work on human fossils in East Africa.[1]
Louise started finding fossils in 1977. She was six years old. She is the youngest person to find hominid fossils.[2] In 1993, she replaced her father Richard Leakey as field expedition leader for Turkana paleontological expeditions in one of the most arid and hostile environments on Earth.
Today, together with her mother, Meave Leakey, she leads the Koobi Fora research project. The project has found some of the most important hominid fossils of the past two decades. The most recent is Kenyanthropus platyops.
Louise Leakey was born in Kenya in 1972, the same year as her grandfather Louis Leakey died. She married Emmanuel de Merode, a Belgian primatologist in 2003. They have two daughters: Seiya, born in 2004, and Alexia born in 2006.[2]
Family tree
| Frida Avern | Louis Leakey | Mary Nicol | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Colin Leakey | Meave Epps | Richard Leakey | Margaret Cropper | Jonathan Leakey | Philip Leakey | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Louise Leakey | Emmanuel de Merode | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Related pages
References
Other websites
- Koobi Fora Research Project
- Leakey Foundation Archived 2006-11-02 at the Wayback Machine
- TED Talks: Louise Leakey digs for humanity's origins Archived 2008-11-19 at the Wayback Machine at TED in 2008