Louis S. B. Leakey

British anthropologist

• Born: August 7, 1903; Kabete, British East Africa (now in Kenya)
• Died: October 1, 1972; London, England

Louis Leakey’s lifelong examinations of the fossil remains near Lake Victoria and in the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa have provided clues as to the origin of the human species. His work and his support of the study of animal behavior in the wild have significantly advanced understanding of both how evolution occurred and how prehistoric humans managed to survive and eventually prevail.

Primary field: Biology

Specialty: Anthropology

Early Life

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was born in 1903 in Kabete, Kenya, then a tiny Anglican missionary station in British East Africa. His mother, Mary Bazett, was the daughter of a colonel in the British Indian Army, and his father, Harry Leakey, was an Anglican priest who had been born in France. The Leakeys set out to Christianize the Kikuyu, the predominant tribe in the area of their mission station. Leakey began life there as something of a celebrity, for he was the first Caucasian child the Kikuyu had ever seen. The boy learned the Kikuyu language before he learned English. Leakey spent his boyhood hunting, trapping, exploring the countryside, and absorbing information about the flora and fauna of East Africa. His family returned to England in 1910, but returned to Africa for a few years during World War I.

Leakey received his formal education in England, first at Weymouth College and later at Cambridge University. While playing rugby in October, 1923, Leakey was kicked in the head. The resulting headaches and loss of memory were so severe that he had to leave Cambridge for a year. During that time, he spent several months looking for the remains of dinosaurs in East Africa. In January 1925, he returned to Cambridge to finish his education.

Life’s Work

Leakey expended most of his energy on advancing the frontiers of paleoanthropology; whatever energy he had left was devoted to raising the money to finance his field expeditions. To secure funding for his research in Africa after he left Cambridge, he won fellowships and grants, wrote essays and books that produced modest royalties, gave lectures for minuscule fees, and even bartered African curios for such necessities as clothing. He also proved to be an excellent salesperson for his beloved discipline, unfailingly persuading private benefactors, foundations, and such organizations as the National Geographic Society that his research was worthwhile and would deepen and broaden understanding of the human prehistoric past. As a result of drive, skill, and luck in finding and displaying the artifacts he found in East Africa, Leakey managed to keep himself in the field.

After leaving Cambridge, Leakey began to concentrate on the two fossil sites that would make his international reputation: Lake Victoria, where his discoveries of the fossil remains of various apes at the time were not thought to be of much importance but have subsequently been hailed as a vastly underrated achievement, and Olduvai Gorge, in what is now Tanzania. Leakey spent most of his time at Olduvai, where he and his team discovered the fossilized remains of hominids that brought him worldwide renown.

However, before he achieved stature as an anthropologist, Leakey suffered from two scandals. A personal scandal involved his well-publicized divorce from his first wife, Frida, and his public affair with a young student, Mary Nicol, whom he had met in 1933 and later married.

A professional scandal stemmed from Leakey’s tendency to let his enthusiasm overcome his caution, causing him to claim too much without thoroughly analyzing the evidence and carefully building a case to support his claims. Specifically, when Leakey discovered two hominid fossils, one consisting of pieces of a skull exhibiting a smooth forehead and the other the infamous “Kanam jaw,” he leapt to the conclusion that he had discovered a representative of the true line from which modern humans (Homo sapiens) had descended. His assertion was soon refuted by geologist Percy Boswell. Although Leakey was wounded by the critique and well aware of the damage it had done to his credibility, his stubbornness was such that even though he could not defend his claim for the Kanam jaw, he never relinquished his claim that the prehistoric source of Homo sapiens would be found in one of his fossil sites.

In time, Leakey decided to concentrate his attention on Olduvai Gorge. What attracted the Leakeys to Olduvai was its great abundance of primitive stone tools. They understandably reasoned that basic stone tools located in geological formations of great age must have been made by primitive humans or human ancestors. Beginning in the mid-1930s, they spent more than thirty years collecting tools and searching methodically for the remains of those creatures who had made and used the tools. However, the human ancestor for which Leakey sought eluded them.

After World War II, Leakey became the director of the National Museum at Nairobi. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Leakeys returned to Olduvai in search of the elusive evidence of a hominid toolmaker that could explain the presence of the primitive tools at Olduvai and shed light on the evolutionary process that has produced modern Homo sapiens. In 1959, the long search finally came to a triumphant end, bringing the Leakeys international recognition for their work.

Toward the end of the 1959 expedition to Olduvai, when Leakey was ill with the malaria that periodically plagued him, Mary went into the field alone. While there, she discovered pieces of what had eluded them for nearly three decades, the skull of what appeared to be an Olduvai toolmaker. The find made Leakey’s reputation and also made him something of a celebrity. He dubbed the skull Zinjanthropus boisei. Although it clearly is not a direct ancestor of modern man, but rather a dead end in the primate evolutionary process, “Zinj” (an Arabic term for East Africa), as it came to be called, remains the best example of its type ever discovered. First displayed at the Fourth Pan-African Conference on Prehistory, it was a sensation and ensured Leakey’s stature as a premier paleoanthropologist.

Zinj was a first in many ways. It was, for example, not only the first more or less complete skull of its kind but also the first to be accurately dated by the potassium-argon dating process. Tests performed using that technique indicated that Zinj was approximately 1.8 million years old, far older than had been estimated using less reliable scientific methods. An entirely new era had begun for physical anthropology and the study of prehistory.

Despite his age and the infirmities that plagued him toward the end of his career, Leakey remained active both in the field and on the lecture circuit. The discovery of Zinj in 1959 was followed by what was in some ways an even more significant find in 1962. Leakey announced to the world the discovery of what he claimed were true Homo fossils, ancient ancestors of modern man that were dated at 1.75 million years. These creatures came to be called Homo habilis, or “handy man.” There were four such partial skulls, named Johnny’s Child, Cindy, George, and Twiggy, and although their condition was fragmentary, that did not stop Leakey from insisting, primarily on the grounds that their brain capacity was estimated at between 600 and 700 cubic centimeters, that they were Homo and not merely hominid. Leakey’s insistence that the fossils were those of true ancestors of humans provoked controversy that remains largely unresolved; in any case, the discovery served to confirm Leakey’s place in modern paleoanthropology.

After the discoveries of Zinjanthropus boisei (subsequently renamed Australopithecus boisei and now known as Paranthropus boisei) and Homo habilis, Leakey turned his attention to the study of living creatures. Too ill to engage in field observation of primates, he encouraged and supported work by others, including Cynthia Booth, Jane Goodall, and Dian Fossey. Also, Leakey’s earlier work at Lake Victoria on prehistoric monkeys came to be recognized by scientists as of equal importance to his discoveries of Zinj and Homo habilis, for those Miocene apes provided as much information about the evolution of modern apes as the fossil discoveries of hominids revealed about human origins.

While dressing on the morning of Sunday, October 1, 1972, Leakey suffered a heart attack and died within hours. His body was returned to Kenya for interment, and he was buried beside his parents at Limuru.

Impact

Leakey was not a practitioner of a traditional science such as physics, biology, or chemistry; thus, it is difficult to assess the significance of his contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Much of what he discovered, particularly the hominid fossils unearthed at Olduvai Gorge, cannot be compared reasonably or accurately to discoveries that lend themselves to more precise scientific definition. Still, Leakey’s long career as a field paleoanthropologist has undoubtedly produced the answers to many questions thought unanswerable when he began his work. Knowledge of both prehistoric man and animals, as well as many living creatures, has been dramatically expanded through his efforts. Leakey both advanced anthropology as a discipline and brought it to the attention of the public in a way that had never been done before. He was an almost perfect blend of entrepreneur and serious scientist.

Bibliography

Bowman-Kruhm, Mary. The Leakeys: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. Print. Chronicles the life and work of the Leakey family, depicting the personalities, personal interests, and accomplishments of Louis and Mary Leakey and their children.

Cole, Sonia Mary. Leakey’s Luck: The Life of Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey. New York: Harcourt, 1975. Print. The first full-scale biography of Leakey, written by a friend and colleague of Leakey’s at the request of Mary Leakey.

Lewin, Roger. “The Old Man of Olduvai Gorge.” Smithsonian 33.7 (Oct. 2002): 82. Print. Profile of Leakey, describing his discoveries about human origins, criticisms of his work, and the work of his wife, Mary, and other members of his family.