SCIENCE
Read our interviews with Meave and Louise Leakey to understand the evolving life of a paleoanthropologist.
Teachers, scroll down for a quick list of key resources in our Teachers’ Toolkit.

Photograph by Kenneth Garrett, National Geographic
Discussion Ideas
- Read through the Nat Geo News article on the new fossil discoveries in East Africa. Why is LD 350-1, the new fossil discovery, described as a “transition” form?
- LD 350-1 has aspects of both earlier and younger hominin fossils. Like older fossils, LD 350-1 has a receding chin line. Like younger fossils, LD 350-1 has slim molars, unique pattern of tooth cusps, and a similarly shaped mandible.
- “The chin looks backwards in time. But the shape of the teeth looks forward,” says Bill Kimbel, director of the Institute of Human Origins, who co-led the analysis of the new specimen.
- Why aren’t all scientists convinced LD 350-1 points to East African origins for human evolution?
- The fossil record is faaaaaar from complete! There is a lot left to be discovered. (Get digging!) “You could put . . . all [hominin fossils dating from 2-3 million years ago] into a small shoe box and still have room for a good pair of shoes,” says Kimbel.
- Where else might Homo species have originated?
- South Africa. Many researchers think that “the best candidate for our genus’s immediate ancestor is a South African australopithecine, Australopithecus sediba.”
- Who is Lucy?
- Lucy is the nickname of the Australopithecus aferensis specimen AL 288-1, discovered in 1974 in Hadar, Ethiopia. Lucy’s skeleton is much older and much more complete than LD 350-1, the newly discovered hominin jawbone. Read more about Lucy’s discovery here.
- Who is Handy Man? How did he earn that nickname?
- Handy Man is the nickname of the first specimen of Homo habilis, an early ancestor much younger (by more than a million years) than Lucy and her A. aferensis pals.
- Handy Man earned his nickname because he was found with sediments that also contained the oldest stone tools discovered at that time. (Older tools have since been found.)
- How does LD 350-1 link Lucy and Handy Man?
- It may not! The fossil record is wildly incomplete.
- Remember, LD 350-1 is a “transitional” fossil, younger than Lucy but older than Handy Man. LD 350-1 “has turned up as if ‘on request,’ suggesting a plausible evolutionary link between Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis,” says Fred Spoor of University College, London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
TEACHERS’ TOOLKIT
Nat Geo: Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree
Nat Geo: Real-World Geography: Dr. Meave Leakey
Nat Geo: Real-World Geography: Dr. Louise Leakey
African Fossils (find your favorite and examine it just like a paleontologist!)
(extra credit) Science: Early Homo at 2.8 Ma from Ledi-Geraru, Afar, Ethiopia (warning: behind a paywall)
(extra credit) Nature: Reconstructed Homo habilis type OH 7 suggests deep-rooted species diversity in early Homo
Man was created by God. The skulls discovered belonged to the giant gorillas that may have found extinction.