Paleonanthropological Research in the Laetoli Area, Tanzania

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Paleontological research over the past fifty years or so has demonstratedin spectacular fashion the significance of sites in East Africa fordocumenting the earliest stages in human evolution. Laetoli in northernTanzania is renowned as one of the most important of these sites. Previousresearch at Laetoli by Mary Leakey in the late 1970s and early 1980s led tomajor new discoveries that have contributed significantly to an improvedunderstanding of the evolutionary history of humans and of African faunasin general. Although this research has laid an excellent foundation forgeological and paleontological investigations in the region, it is evidentthat there is still a great deal that can be learned about the course andcontext of human evolution from continued studies at Laetoli. The aim of this project is to continue with a long-term program ofgeological and paleontological research at Pliocene localities in theLaetoli area that was initiated by the PI in the summer of 1998. The mainobjectives are to recover additional fossil hominids and to obtain moredetailed contextual information on the paleontology, geology, dating, andpaleoecology. The proposed program of field research and exploration inthe Laetoli area offers the potential to yield new data that willcontribute significantly to a better understanding of the fossil evidencefor human evolution and its paleoecological context. Results from theseinvestigations will be used to address several key problems in the study ofpaleoanthropology: (1) clarification of the phylogenetic relationships andtaxonomy of early hominids; (2) a better appreciation of the anatomy andpaleobiology of Australopithecus afarensis - a pivotal species in theinterpretation of the early evolutionary history of humans, and (3) thedevelopment of a more detailed and critical assessment of thepaleoecological associations of the Laetoli hominids in order to identifyfactors that may have contributed to the initial divergence and subsequentdiversification of early hominids in Africa.