Meave Leakey Interview (page: 4 / 7) Pioneering Paleoanthropologist	Print Interview

When you found this skull, Kenyanthropus platyops, what was that experience like? What did it look like? Did you know immediately that it was something extraordinary?

Meave Leakey: It was in the ground in situ, but it was very cracked and broken, and it had roots going through it and it was covered in rock. It actually took one of the preparators in the museum, Christopher Chiari, nine months to get the rock off the skull, so it was nine months before we could really look at it and see what we had. So from the time of digging it out of the ground, we had to wait nine months before we could study it and then when we studied it we had to compare it with all sorts of other things. So that's why it wasn't actually published until 2001, in spite of being found in 1999.
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How soon did you realize this was something very important?

Meave Leakey: Well, the first thing we did was take a cast up to Ethiopia and look at all the afarensis things. That was the main thing we wanted to check, first and foremost, was whether it was the same as Lucy and whether it was Australopithecus afarensis. I think after we had done that, we had a feeling that we probably had something different. We then went down to South Africa and did the same thing down there, and through the entire study we were building up the evidence and we were saying, "We won't actually make any deductions yet. We'll do the whole study and do the whole comparison." We made a big database of all the measurements. And then we could see how far out of the range of other things our measurements were, and which features come outside the range and which features come in, and then we can assess whether we really have something. A different species? The same species or something else? Or a different genus and species, or whatever it is. Having done that, that was the conclusion we came to. It made more sense to make it a new genus and species than just to make it a new species or to put it in anything that was known.

So it's really a matter of looking at the variation of other things and just seeing where it fits, but this particular specimen has very small teeth compared to anything else. It has this very flat face and very deep face. And there are a number of measurements that you can take that just fall out of the known range of other species, which is how you decide what you have.

Not everyone accepted your revolutionary discovery. In Scientific American, Tim White of U.C. Berkeley was quoted saying, "It's just a variant of afarensis. It's not a new genus."

Meave Leakey: That's right. Tim doesn't believe in diversity before afarensis at all. He sees everything as a straight line. That's how people saw the whole of human evolution, but it simply doesn't make any sense to me. There's no other animal that would evolve in a straight line for six million years or even for three million years. It makes much more sense to have diversity earlier in time. What he's saying is that at the moment we don't have any good evidence that there is that diversity, because he doesn't accept platyops. He says it's too distorted. Where we see a flat face, he says that's due to the distortion rather than anything else. I find it hard to make that distortion come to a flat face. It is distorted because it has got these many, many cracks in it, but I don't think that distortion causes a flattening of the face to that extent. Most other colleagues agree with us. Very few others actually take Tim's line, but I think it's good to have difference of opinion. That's really how science progresses. If you have differences of opinion it stimulates others to do more research and come up with an answer in the end. It's not a bad thing at all. It's a very good thing. Hopefully, sooner rather than later, we'll find another specimen that will prove the point one way or the other.

How did you first become interested in science and exploration? We understand you were strongly attracted to nature as a child in England. Could you tell us about that?

Meave Leakey: I guess that's where it all started really. I don't remember much about it. I remember a little, but my mother tells me...

I was always collecting insects and caterpillars and this and that. We had a very small cottage because it was the war years, so my father was away in the war. We were living in a small cottage in Kent with woods all around it. So I used to go out and collect all these little insects and things like that. I really loved nature even in those days. My mother said -- we had a little porch and the porch was full of jars of things that I used to feed everyday -- she had a number of stories of how I kept little furry caterpillars. I used to keep them on a matchstick and go to bed with them and then they'd get out in the night and there were furry caterpillars all over the bed. But I don't remember too much about it. I just remember vague things. I think the memories --you never know how much you remember and how much you've been told and you put things together. But I think, really, in those days I was interested. Then, my father was very interested in natural history, and as a child he had always done that sort of thing. He used to take a lot of photographs, so he taught me how to develop and print photographs when I got older. He had all these wonderful pictures of wildlife and birds, and snakes and lizards, and all sorts of things. I remember just loving spending time with him in the workshop and in the dark room. And learning how, and seeing all his photographs that he hadn't really looked at for years and years.
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What kind of work did your father do?

Meave Leakey: He was a surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon. So he was working with bones, too. Another link!

You say your family had moved because of the war. Did that affect your schooling as well?

Meave Leakey: I think I was too young then. I was born in 1942, so by the time I was going to school the war was over. But I do remember in those early years there was no sugar, no sweets and no eggs, and no this or that. When these things gradually came back it was such a treat, these things that modern children take for granted.

Did your parents foster your love of nature?

Meave Leakey: Oh, very much so, particularly my father, I think. It was a shared love really. We used to have holidays down by the sea in Cornwall. Grubbing around in rock pools on the beach and things was another way that we shared that interest. Both my parents were very much country people, although he was always in the city, so my initial years, after the war years, I was actually living in a suburb of London.

Did you have brothers and sisters?

Meave Leakey: Yes, but my sister is four years younger than me, and my brother is nine years younger than me. So they were quite spaced out. We weren't all born together and growing up together. By the time that my brother was going to school I was in boarding school. My brother, in particular, I didn't get to know that well as a child.

What did they become? What do they do?

Meave Leakey: My brother became a geologist. He did some general geology, and then he worked for a firm, looking at geology to see the structure for buildings. My sister was also interested in natural history. She did her M.Sc. in Uganda actually, on a funny little animal called a potto. I don't know if you know what a potto is. It's a primate. It's a prosimian. It's related closely to the bush baby but it's very slow. You can't believe how slow it is when it moves. It's nocturnal, so poor Jeannie, my sister, was up all night watching this thing moving so slowly. But she was studying behavior of pottos for her M.Sc. and then eventually she went into teaching.

She must have been very patient.

Meave Leakey: I think so. I think it would have sent me to sleep.

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