YSU Leakey: Mankind must know its past

The researcher encouraged students to study human ancestry.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Human ancestors evolved down many paths, but today we all share a single identity and must be responsible for our future, a noted scientist said during an appearance at Youngstown State University.
"We are a single species living today, but we have a very complex past. From that complexity, we're the only species left," said Meave Leakey, a noted researcher in human ancestry, who delivered Thursday's Skeggs Lecture to an audience of more than 500 in YSU's Kilcawley Center.
"Because of our large brains, we have a great responsibility in where we're going in the future. I think it's important to know the past to actually think about where we are now and where we're going," she said.
Discovery: In 1999, Leakey, whose family has dominated the field for 70 years, made the historic discovery of a 3.5 million-year-old skull, known as Kenyanthropus platyops (flat-faced man of Kenya), which she said belonged to a new genus and species of human ancestors. Leakey is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya, where she has worked since 1969.
Over the last few decades, there have been constant new discoveries, which have made the field of human origins more complex and pushed back the limits of human ancestry from 1.5 million to up to 5 million years ago.
Advice: But Leakey said beginning students should not despair over the increasing complexity of the field. "If you look for patterns, instead of looking for names, then it's much, much easier, because you can actually divide all these things into ancestors that were living in different ways," she said. "Humans like to group things. Humans like to put things in understandable blocks, and you can do that with human ancestors, and then it becomes much less complicated," she explained.
"Go for it," she advised students interested in studying human ancestry. However, she added, "There's not much money there. Many students want to make money in their careers. If you do this, you do it because you like doing it, not because you're going to be rich."
Some scientists, known as lumpers, tend to lump new finds into old classifications, but others, known as the splitters, tend to identify a new find as a new genus or species.
"I'm not a splitter. I don't split every single one. I put things in categories, and, if things don't fit in a category, then it has to be something else," she said. "It simply didn't fit into any of the known categories," she said of her 1999 find. "We thought it was better to name it a new genus and species, and, if it's been proved wrong, it will at least have generated some new research." she said.
"I don't believe in this unilinear idea [a single line of descent] for human evolution. In the old days, it used to be unilinear the whole way through, and then people realized there was a lot of diversity in the more recent finds," she explained.