Throughout History...They've been Writing About It
Ever since there was something worth knowing about history, people have been leaving traces of what occurred. Scraps of information hidden under dust and in stone, in the bones of people long gone and in the writings of men long forgotten. Here's a run down of the notable people who pick up these pieces of history and glue them together for the rest of us.
Famous Archaeologists
The Leakeys- The Leakey family consists of Mary, Louis and Richard. This family of archaeologists have made huge strides in our understanding of the development of early man in Africa. They were also a family of Anthropologists. Mary Leakey and her son Richard Leakey live and work in Kenya. Mary Leakey is known as the most popular of the Leakey family and has discovered the Proconsul africanus in 1948, Australopithecus boisei in 1959, Homo habilis in 1960, and a 89-foot long trail of early human footprints found at Laetoli (1979).
Famous Paleoanthropologist(s)
Eugene Dubois- One very influential Paleoanthropologist was Dutchman Eugene Dubois; Dubois was a doctor who was serving in the Dutch army on the island of Java, deep in the heart of Indonesia (and roughly 17% of all known coffee makers). While looking for fossils on the island with generous help from forced-labor convicts during 1891, Dubois came across a skull with a capacity of 900cc, much to small for the average human but also significantly larger than any other known primate. Dubois claimed to have found a fossil speciman of "Pithecanthropus", or ape-man. Widely refered to as the Java Man, the find forced many existing scientists to take the claim of human evolution more seriously. At the same time, similar skeletal remains found elsewhere in Asia and in the world caused scientists to reclassify the specimen as Homo Erectus; the upright man. Dubois had discovered the most widespread and common of our human ancestors found to date, and his find finally forced Paleoanthropology to be recognized as a legitimate science.
Famous Historian(s)
Herodotus- Hailed as the "Father of History" by some, Herodotus was a historian in Ancient Greece during the 5th century B.C. Most agree that he was born sometime around 484 B.C. in his hometown of Halicarnussus, a port city. During his life, he traveled widely around the Mediterranean and he is known to have collected much of his information from his travels, but ultimately little is known of his personal life. Herodotus is most famous for writing The Histories, a volume of nine books detailing the Persian Empire and the Greco-Persian wars, as well as some general geographic and cultural information of the time. This is one of the most important historical works from the time period, as it is one of the first examples of a historian collecting information, verifying their accuracy as well as techniques of the time would allow, and forming that information into an engaging retelling of history. The work is remarkable in other ways as well; for instance, the book contains one of the earliest European accounts of Asia yet known.