British/Kenyan archaeologist and anthropologist who became famous for his academic work centered on human origins. Louis Leakey, his wife Mary, and their second son Richard made the key discoveries that have shaped our understanding of the first men. Richard Leakey and his wife, Maeve, sustain a family legacy of research that is now, with the work of their daughter Louise, three generations deep.

"I am frequently askew how it came about that although we started our survey at Olduvai in 1931, we did not carry out our first major excavation until 1952. The answer is simple. It lies in my determination to explore the huge are of the gorge before starting detailed excavations. This took twenty years. Had it not been for the war, the lack of funds, and the fact that I took off three whole years from my prehistoric studies to write a monograph on the Kikuyu tribe, the initial survey would not have been so drawn out." (By the Evidence: Memoirs, 1932-1951 by L.S.B. Leakey, New York and London: Harcourt Brown Jovanovich, 1974, pp. 46-47)

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was born in Kabete, British East Africa, now Kenya. His parents, Mary Bazett and Harry Leakey, were missionaries of the Church of England. The Leakeys were among the first wave of misionaries in Kikuyuland. The young Louis grew up with the Kikuyu tribe, learning their customs and language, and how to throw a spear and to handle a war club. Later in life he became a member of the Kikuyu age-group called Mukanda, "from which, I regret to say, not a few Mau Mau leaders have sprung." (Mau Mau and the Kikuyu by L.S.B. Leakey, London: Methuen & Co., 1952, p. viii)

The Kikuyu gave leakey a new name, Wakuruigi (Son of the Sparrow Hawk); he said that he was more of a Kikuyu than English. (Kenya: Contrasts and Problems by L.S.B. Leakey, London: Methuen & Co., 1936, p. vii) When Leakey was twelve he found his first stone tools, and knew that he wanted to be an archaeologist. However, at that time Asia was generally considered to be the center of human evolution, not East Africa. Leakey studied prehistory, anthropology and archaeology in Cambridge, where he was the first to play tennis in shorts.

After being kicked in the head – twice – in a game, Leakey had a headache for a long period of time, and had to abandon temporarily his studies. He was diagnosed as suffering from epilepsy. In June 1926 Leakey received his baccalaureate, and then set out to prove Darwin's theory that Africa was humankind's homeland.  

Between the years 1924 and 1935 Leakey made a series of expeditions in East Africa in search of man's fossil ancestors. Despite attempts to dissuade him, he became interested in particular Olduvai Gorge, a 300-foot-deep, thirty-mile-long chasm not far from the Ngorongoro Crater. It was made famous by a German entomologist named Wilhelm Kattwinkel, who first discovered its value in 1911. Leakey characterized him as a nearsighted butterfly collector.

Leakey dug at Olduvai two decades without finding anything especially significant, except animal fossils and flit tools, which on the other hand provided important evidence of human habitation. The Pleistocene geologist and emissary of the Royal Society, Percy Boswell, whom Leakey invited to visit the sites with him, questioned his understanding of basic geology in an article published in Nature in March 1935.

In 1928 Leakey married Frida Avern, a Cambridge graduate, who had studied modern and medieval languages, and attended lectures on archaeology at the London Museum and London University. Frida accompanied him on excavations; she found one of the Olduvai Gorge's most productive sites, FLK (Frida Leakey Korongo). Leakey's marriage ended in divorce in 1933, when he fell in love with 20-year-old Mary Douglas Nicol, daughter of the landscape painter Erskine Nicol. Leakey first met Mary at a dinner party in London. He asked her to make drawings for his book Adam's Ancestors (1934). Mary traveled with him to Africa. They married in 1936, and had three children, Jonathan, Richard, and Philip.

With his new companion, Leakey collected early manmade tools, mostly made of basalt and quartzite, and fossilized bones of many extinct mammals. In 1945 Leakey became the curator of the Coryndon Memorial Museum at Nairobi. Mary Leakey made their first big find in 1948, the skull of an ape called Proconsul africanus on Rusinga Island ("Island of the Apes") in Lake Victoria, Kenya. The remains of this 1.6-million-year-old distant human ancestor provided weight to the theory, that humans had originated in Africa, rather than in Asian.

As Louis Leakey began to spend less and less time at Olduvai, and concentrate on raising funds and lecturing, the site became Mary Leakey's domain. She worked there most of the next 25 years. During her excavation at Laetoli, about 30 miles south of Olduvai, Mary Leakey found in 1978 fossilized hominid footprints, which looked so fresh that she said, "they could have been left this morning". Personally and professionally Mary and Louis lived separate lives from the mid-1960s. Her books include Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man (1979) and an autobiography Disclosing the Past (1984). The best of her drawings, which he made while exploring a late Stone Age site, were published in a book in 1983.

During World War II, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s Leakey also served as a spy for the British government and acted as a court interpreter in in the trial of the Kapenguria Six – Achieng Oneko, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei, Kungu Karumba, Bildad Kaggia, and Jomo Kenyatta, future president of an independent Kenya. Defense lawyer Pritt denounced Leakey for having animosity against the Kikuyu and for writing books condemning Mau Mau. He left the courtroom and refused to return. (Rethinking Mau Mau in Colonial Kenya by S. M. Shamsul Alam, New York: N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 183)

When the Mau Mau uprising forced Leakey to stop his excavations at Olduvai, he wrote Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (1952), which sold well both in the United Kingdom and the United States. Leakey stated that "Mau Mau and other political leaders have deliberately misled the present generation of Kikuyu into believing that the greater part of the White Highlands, the land occupied by European settlement, was also once Kikuyu land and was 'stolen' from them. This deliberate lie is fostered in order to make the Kikuyu cast envious eyes on the whole of the land now occupied by European farmers." (Ibid., pp. 105-106) In the next book Defeating Mau Mau (1954) Leakey argued that Mau Mau had never been a part of the Kikuyu culture.

The rebellion destroyed the old Kenya Leakey knew. Before the state of emergency was declared in 1952, he had warned the government officials of the Mau Mau secret society, but he had not been taken seriously. Leakey was shocked by the way "his" tribe had abandoned old customs and traditions. Because of his intelligence work for the CID (Crime Investigation Department), Leakey was guarded by a Meru tribesman wherever he went. The Mau Mau put a price of £500 on his head. (Leakey's Luck: The Life of Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, 1903-1972 by Sonia Cole, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 204) His cousin Gray Leakey and his wife Mary were murdered on their farm. Mary was strangled and Gray had been buried head downwards, possibly while still alive – it was a ritual murder. (Ibid., p. 206) The main victims were those members of the Kikuyu who refused to take the Mau Mau oath.

From the 1950s the Leakeys expeditions to Olduvai Gorge produced several important discoveries of early primate fossils, named Zinjanthropus (now called Australopithecus boisei), which Mary Leakey found in 1959 from the lowest and oldest excavation site. It has been said, that it was Mary who gave the team scientific validity. The discovery of the "Zinj," also fondly referred to as "Dear Boy", made the Leakeys famous. Louis first believed that it was a "missing link" between humans and apes. He wrote an article for the National Geographic magazine and estimated that Zinjanthropus was 600,000 years old, in which he was wrong. Using a new method of dating, the carbon-14 technique, geophysicists from the University of California at Berkeley concluded that the site was 1.75 million years old. But the excavations brought to light a rich fossil fauna.

As a conservationist, Louis Leakey was active in promoting game preserves in East Africa. His interests and writings were wide, including all aspects of African natural history, primate behaviour, and the origins of man. From the 1960s, Leakey devoted much of his time to the Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology in Nairobi.

Among Leakey's academic protegees were Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas, and Jane Goodall, who became famous for her studies of the behavior of chimpanzees. Leakey stayed long periods at the London home of Vanne Goodall, Jane Goodall's mother. When Goodall reported Leakey that she had seen a chimp named David Graybeard to catch insects with a stick, he cabled a reply: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans." (Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe by Jane Goodall,  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992, p. 19) Goodall said that if Leakey had not directed her footsteps to Gombe in 1960, the chimpanzees would almost certainly lost their refuge. (Ibid., p. 238)

In 1978 Mary Leakey found a trail of clear ancient hominid footprints of two adults and a child – some 3.5 million years old – impressed and preserved in volcanic ash from a site in Tanzania called Laetoli. They belonged to a new hominid species, best represented by the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton, which was found at Hadar, Ethiopia, by Donald Johanson. ". . . it is tempting to see them as a man, a woman and a child," Mary Leakey wrote in her autobiography. "Whether or nt this is so, the middle-sized individual was stepping deliberately into the prints left by the largest." (Disclosing the Past by Mary Leakey, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1984, p. 178)

Russell Tuttle of the University of Chicago, who studied the Laetoli footprints at the invitation of Mary Leakey, concluded that the apelike feet of A. afarensis could not have made the tracks. "In all discernible morphological features, the feet of the individuals that made the trails are indistinguishable from those of modern humans." (quoted in The Truth about Human Origins by Brad Harrub, Bert Thompson, Montgomery, AL: Apologetics Press, 2003, p. 67) The Lucy skeleton on the other hand arose a bitter debate. Mary and Richard Leakey criticized Donald Johanson for proclaiming a new species too hastily – the fossils could be a mix of several different species.

From 1961 to 1964 the Leakeys and their son Jonathan unearthed fossils of Homo habilis, "handy man," the oldest known primate with human characteristics and discovered in 1967 Kenyapithecus africanus. The Leakeys claimed that Homo habilis had walked upright and viewed it as a direct ancestor of modern humans. It had a brain almost 50 percent larger than that of the Australopithicenes. The fossil challenged the idea that two hominids cannot occupy the same area at the same time. Also evidence of human habitation in California, more than 50 000 years, old was found.

Louis Leakey died of a heart attack in London in 1972, at the age of 69. In the same year his son Richard Leakey, who directed National Museum of Kenya, reported the discovery of a 1.8 million-year old skull of modern humans from Koobi Fora, located on the border of Ethiopia and Kenya. Three years later he discoverd a skull of Homo habilis, which seemed to resemble one identified by his father. Leakey believed that "The Skull 1470" was 2.9 million years old. With the donation of a kidney from his brother Philip, Leakey survived kidney failure in the 1970s. In 1984 he and another paleontologist discovered a virtually complete Homo erectus skeleton. From his father he adopted the idea, that there were at least two parallel lines of human evolution, with one leading to modern humans.

By the end of 1980s, Leakey had abandoned fossil hunting for wildlife conservation. President Daniel Arap Moi appointed him head of what is now the Kenya Wildlife Service. Leakey signed in 1994 amid politically motivated accusations of mismanagement, only to be reinstated by Moi 4,5 years later. In 1997 he was elected to a opposition seat in the parliament. As a result of an airplane crash in 1993, Leakey lost both legs below the knees, but he continued his scientific work. Mary Leakey died in Nairobi on December 9, 1996, at the age of 83.

For further reading: Leakey's Luck: The Life of L.S.B. Leakey 1903-1972 by Sonia Cole (1975); Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence, ed. by Glynn Llywelyn Isaac & Elizabeth Richards McCown (1976); The Making of Mankind by Richard Leakey (1981); One Life by Richard Leakey (1983); Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (1992); Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings by Virginia Morrell (1995); Louis S.B. Leakey: Beyond the Evidence by Martin Pickford (1997); The Leakeys: Uncovering the Origins of Humankind by Margaret Poynter (1997); The Leakeys: A Biography by Mary Bowman-Kruhm (2010); The Leakeys: the Family That Traced Human Origins to Africa by Angie Timmons (2020). Anthropological findings and speculations have given much material for science fiction writing. Among the most outstanding works are Robert Graves's study The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948), William Golding's The Inheritors (1955) and Björn Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger (1978). See Apeman, Spaceman, ed. by Leon E. Stover and Harry Harrison (1968); Anthropology through Science Fiction, ed. by Carol Mason, Martin H. Greenberg and Patricia Warrick (1974); Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction , ed. by Eric S. Rabkin and George Edgar Slusser (1987).

Selected works:

• The Stone Age Culture of Kenya Colony, 1931 (illustrated by Frida Leakey)
• Adam's Ancestors: The Evolution of Man and His Culture, 1934 (illustrated by Mary Leakey)
• The Stone Age races of Kenya, 1935
• Kenya: Contrasts and Problems, 1936
• Stone Age Africa: An Outline of Prehistory in Africa, 1936
• White African, 1937
• The Miocene Hominoidea of East Africa, 1951 (with Wilfrid Le Gros Clark)
• Olduvai Gorge: A Report on the Evolution of the Hand-Axe Culture in Beds I-IV, 1951
• Mau Mau and the Kikuyu, 1952
• Animals in Africa, 1953
• Defeating Mau Mau, 1954 (with Peter Schmidt)
  
• 'Finding the World's Earliest Man', 1960 (in National Geographic Magazine, September)
• Olduvai Gorge 1951-1961: Vol. 1. A  Preliminary Report on the Geology and Fauna, 1965 (repr. 1967)
• Unveiling Man's Origins, 1969 (with Vanne Morris Goodall)
• Animals of East Africa: The Wild Realm, 1969
• Olduvai Gorge, 1965-1967, 1970
• By the Evidence: Memoirs, 1932-1951, 1974
• The Southern Kikuyu Before 1903, 1977
• Olduvai Gorge, 2009 (5 vols., with Mary Leakey)