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.

"To me it's a question of being able to look backward and give the present a root... To give meaning to where we are today, we need to look at where we've have come from." (Richard Leakey, in National Geographic, February 1998)

Louis Leakey was born in Kabete, British East Africa, now Kenya, into a missionary family. At the age of twelve he found his first fossils, and knew that he wanted to be an archeologist. Leakey graduated from Cambridge, and set out to prove Darwin's theory that Africa was humankind's homeland. At that time it was believed that early man originated in somewhere Asia. Between the years 1926 and 1935 he led a series of expeditions in East Africa in search of man's fossil ancestors. He was 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 dug at Olduvai two decades without finding anything especially significant. His first marriage with Frieda Leakey ended in divorce in 1933, when he met and fell in love with 20-year-old Mary Douglas Nicol; they married in 1936. With Mary he collected early manmade tools, mostly made of basalt and quartzite, and fossilized bones of many extinct mammals. His first major discovery was the jaw of a pre human creature called Proconsul. In 1945 Leakey became the curator of the Coryndon Memorial Museum at Nairobi. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he also served as a spy for the British government and acted as a translator in court in 1952-53 during the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the independence party. As a conservationist, 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 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. The discovery of "Zinj" made the Leakeys famous. Louis 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.

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 Louis began spending less and less time at Olduvai, and concentrated on raising funds and lecturing, the place became Mary's domain, where she spent most of the next 25 years. Personally and professionally Mary and Louis lived separate lives from the mid-1960s.

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 later wrote. 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. "Until then the idea that two hominids could occupy the same area at the same time had been unacceptable to most scientists," Mary Leakey wrote in Disclosing the Past (1984). Also evidence of human habitation in California, more than 50 000 years, old was found.

Louis Leakey died 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. Three years later he discoverd the skull of Homo erectus, estimated at 1.6 million years old, and in 1984 he and another paleontologist discovered a virtually complete Homo erectus skeleton. In 1989 Richard Leakey abandoned fossil hunting for wildlife conservation. President Daniel Arap Moi appointed Leakey head of what is now the Kenya Wildlife Service. He signed in 1994 amid politically motivated accusations of mismanagement, only to be reinstated by Moi 4,5 years later. As a result of an airplane crash, Leakey lost both legs below the knees, but he has continued his scientific explorations. Mary Leakey died in Nairobi on December 9, 1996, at the age of 83.

Leakey, Mary (Douglas) - archaeologist. She met and married L.S.B. Leakey while preparing drawings for his book ADAM'S ANCESTORS, and moved to Kenya. In 1948 she discovered Proconsul africanus at Lake Victoria and in 1976 she found fossilized hominid footprints during her excavation at Laetoli. Mary Leakey's works include OLDUVAI GORGE: MY SEARCH FOR EARLY MAN (1979) and an autobiography DISCLOSING THE PAST (1984). - For further reading: Leakey's Luck: the Life of L.S.B. Leakey 1903-1972 by S. Cole (1975); Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence by G.L. Isaac & E.R. 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 by Virginia Morrell (1975) - 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:

• STONE AGE CULTURES OF KENYA COLONY, 1931
• ADAM'S ANCESTORS, 1934
• STONE AGE AFRICA, 1936
• KENYA: CONTRASTS AND PROBLEMS, 1936
• OLDUVAI GORGE, 1951
• ANIMALS IN AFRICA, 1953
• MAU MAU AND THE KIKUYU, 1954
• 'Finding the World's Earliest Man', in National Geographic Magazine, September 1960
• OLDUVAI GORGE 1951-1961, 1965-1967 (2 vols.)