The Nature of Things

In the late twentieth century, there was an abundance of discoveries of hominin fossils and things related to them. In the 1970s, I was a devoted reader of "National Geographic" magazine and it seemed that almost every month's issue had news of some new discovery, most of them in the Great Rift Valley of Africa. Many of those discoveries were made by members of the Leakey family and their teams of searchers.  The family was led by Louis and Mary Leakey, who themselves had made many of those discoveries. The Leakeys were not only fossil hunters but were also supporters and instigators of much of the research taking place in the area at the time. For example, Louis had been instrumental in starting Jane Goodall in her work with chimpanzees and Dian Fossey with mountain gorillas, work that would consume the two women's lives and, in Fossey's case, cost her her life. In the late 1960s, he also hired a young woman named Meave Epps to head a research project on monkeys....