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

A later discovery of yours created quite a stir, didn't it?

Meave Leakey: That was in 2001.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Once we had worked the site at 4.1 million, which is called Kanapoi, we decided that we could work at a site that was the same age as Lucy and see if we could find afarensis, or whether we'd find something else. Because again, I was still thinking that there should have been diversity at that time, and it shouldn't just be the common ancestor there, but it should go back further. So that's why we were working at that age, 'cause it was the same age as the sites from which Lucy came. What we found there was a skull, and other specimens as well. But we only named the skull because we couldn't relate the other specimens directly to the skull. But the skull had a very flat face and a very long face. Lucy's face is much more protruding and much more ape-like in many ways, actually. The face shape showed that the species was not afarensis, it was something different. So it showed that there were at least two hominid species living at the same time as Lucy. So therefore, Lucy wasn't necessarily the common ancestor. It could have been the species that we found, that we called Kenyanthropus platyops, or it can be something else that we haven't yet found. I believe sincerely that in the end, there will be several different things found at that time as there are later.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

So this was not just a new species, but a new genus?

Meave Leakey: We note a new genus and species because it just didn't fit into any of the genera that were known. It may in the end prove that you can fit it into another genus, but for the moment it made more sense to call it a new genus. You didn't know, if you're going to put it in another genus, whether it was better to put it in any of the known ones. It just didn't fit.

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?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. 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.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

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.

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