Kenyan palaeontologist gets award for his work

When renowned palaeontologist Louis Leakey approached Kamoya Kimeu to be a field worker for his expedition in 1960, he was confused.

Kimeu, then 21, thought Leakey would ask him to dig up graves in Olduvai.

"We didn’t know then about hominid bones. I thought we were coming to dig up some graves of dead people,” he said.

Kimeu said he was disturbed as his cultural background did not allow disturbing the dead.

Leakey, aware of Kimeu's fears, took time to convince Kimeu to join palaeontology, the study of the history of life on earth based on fossils.

For Leakey, winning Kimeu's trust was everything he needed in his work.

Kimeu then joined Leakey, the legendary fossil hunter, where he gained knowledge and experience. Fossils are the remains of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and single-celled living things that have been replaced by rock material or impressions of organisms preserved in rock.

With Leakey's guidance, Kimeu gained valuable knowledge and skills on evolution, palaeontology and excavation skills.

 Kimeu was also able to differentiate the remains of one animal from the other, a move that earned him respect among workers.

"To some of our visitors who are inexperienced in fossil-hunting, there is something almost magical in the way Kamoya or one of the team members can walk up a slope that is apparently littered with nothing more than pebbles and pick up a small fragment of black, fossilised bone, announcing that it is, say, part of the upper forelimb of an antelope,” Kimeu said.

Due to his experience, Kimeu became a curator of prehistoric sites for the National Museums of Kenya in 1977.

And now, Kimeu is set to become one of only three honorary doctorate recipients awarded by Case Western Reserve University.

The virtual graduation ceremony is set to be held on May 30, 2021, and will be streamed from Cleveland, Ohio.

After he received the news that he would be awarded an honorary doctorate, he said on Thursday, "It is great to get something like this; it is a special honour for me and my family."

This is not the first award Kimeu has received for his work. In 1985, National Geographic bestowed its highest honour, LaGorce medal to Kimeu.

Then-President Ronald Reagan presented the award to him in 1985.

Kimeu, who also worked with Richard Leakey, has over the years made findings that have provided important insights into human ancestry.

For instance, while working with Richard Leakey at the Peninj site near Lake Natron in Tanzania in 1964, Kimeu found an entire mandible of a Paranthropus boisei (later identified as an Australopithecus boisei) known as the Peninj Mandible.

Following the finding, Louis Leakey was happy that it confirmed the assumption that the robust form of hominid was not ancestral to homo.

Kimeu made another discovery in 1968 while on an expedition with Richard in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia, where he discovered an early Homo sapiens skull.

This discovery was instrumental because until then, no one believed Homo Sapiens could be this old.

Dated at 130,000 years old, until this discovery, many anthropologists believed that Homo sapiens had not appeared until after the Neanderthals or approximately 60,000 years ago at the latest.

Kimeu urged young people to find what they are passionate about before working hard and being patient.