Paul Abell, a chemistry professor who on a field trip in 1978 at Laetoli in East Africa came across the footprints of ancestral bipeds made famous by Mary Leakey, died Jan. 12 at his home in Kingston, R.I. He was 80.
The cause was prostate cancer, his family said.
Mr. Abell taught organic chemistry at the University of Rhode Island for 40 years, retiring in 1990. His research focused on the chemistry of free radicals, the analysis of moon rocks and paleoclimatology, which involves the examination of snail fossils to determine climatic changes.
For 17 summers, Mr. Abell helped the Leakey family of anthropologists-paleontologists look for evidence of early hominids in Tanzania.
Working with Mary Leakey’s team at Laetoli in 1978, he chanced upon a footprint that proved to be part of the famous 80-foot trail of hominid footprints left in hardened volcanic ash dated at 3.6 million to 3.7 million years old.
On having them excavated, Leakey concluded that two individual bipeds had made the tracks, with the possibly of a third stepping in the prints of the biggest of the three. She also concluded that the prints established that human ancestors had begun walking upright much earlier than previously thought.
Mr. Abell was born in Pelham, Mass. He served in the Army Signal Corps in Europe and Japan during World War II. After his military service, he graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1948.
After he received his doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in 1951, Mr. Abell started as an instructor at the University of Rhode Island. Over the years, he was a Fulbright lecturer in Egypt and went on research expeditions in paleontology to the Omo River and Lake Rudolf regions of East Africa for the National Geographic Society.
