anthropologist archaeologist scientist
The parents of L. S. B. Leakey were British missionaries who settled at Kabete, Kenya, near Nairobi, in 1901. Leakey was born on August 7, 1903, in Kabete, where he formed lifelong friendships with boys of the Kikuyu tribe, with whom he grew up.
He is probably the only white man to have been initiated from youth to manhood in a Kikuyu ceremony.
In Britain, the Leakey children attended elementary school; in Africa, they had a tutor. The family sat out World War I in Africa. When the sea lanes opened again in 1919, they returned to Boscombe, where Louis was sent to Weymouth College, a private boys' school, when he was 16. In three years there, he did not do well and complained of hazing and rules that he considered an infringement on his freedom. Advised by one teacher to seek employment in a bank, he secured help from an English teacher in applying to Cambridge. He received a scholarship for his high scores on the entrance exams.
Louis matriculated at the University of Cambridge, his father's alma mater, in 1922, intending to become a missionary to British East Africa.
He frequently told a story about his final exams. When he had arrived in Britain, he had notified the register that he was fluent in Swahili. When he came to his finals, he asked to be examined in this language, and the authorities agreed. Then one day, he received two letters. One instructed him to report at a certain time and place for a viva voce examination in Swahili. The other asked if, at the same time and place, he would examine a candidate in Swahili.
In 1923 he organized an expedition of the British Museum to search for dinosaurs in southern Tanganyika. In 1926, after qualifying in anthropology at Cambridge, Leakey organized and led four East African archeological expeditions. During the third expedition, in 1931, after some very important discoveries of the earliest known (at that time) stone tools at Olduvai, Leakey discovered fossils of human remains at Kanam and Kanjera in Kenya. His claims concerning these fossils, which included the idea that Homo sapiens lived in East Africa at the end of the Middle Pleistocene, were contested by many of his colleagues, and it was only in 1969 that the claims received official acceptance. In 1937 Leakey temporarily ceased to study prehistory in order to spend 3 years working on a monograph of the Kikuyu tribe. During World War II (1939 - 1945) he served as officer in charge of civil intelligence in Nairobi. Leakey always strongly supported Charles Darwin's theory that both man and the great apes originated on the African continent. For 40 years he and his teams patiently excavated at the prehistoric site at Olduvai Gorge on the eastern Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. In 1959 at Olduvai a fossil hominid skull was discovered, which he named Zinjanthropus . In 1960 even more important fossil fragments were discovered. These and a skull found in 1962 at Olduvai were made the types of a new species of man, Homo habilis. In 1962 Leakey also discovered a skull of the type Homo erectus, previously known only in China and Java. Other sites excavated by Leakey include the Lower Miocene sites on Rusinga Island and Songhor, which have yielded remains of protoman dating back 20 million years, and the site at Fort Ternan, where Kenya pithecus wickeri was discovered. This hominid lived about 12 million years ago. In 1964 Leakey organized a team in the United States to excavate near the Calico Mountains in southern California. He and his team discovered evidence that man lived in America more than 50, 000 years ago. Leakey's publications include New Classification of Bow and Arrow in Africa; The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya; Adam's Ancestors; The Stone Age Races of Kenya; Stone Age Africa; Kenya Contrasts and Problems; White African; A Contribution to the Study of the Tumbian Culture in Kenya (with W. E. Owen); Tentative Study of the Pleistocene Sequence and Stone Age Cultures of N. E. Angola; Mau Mau and Kikuyu; Defeating Mau Mau; The Miocene Hominoidea of East Africa (with Le Gros Clark); The Pleistocene Fossil Suidae of East Africa; First Lessons in Kikuyu; Olduvai Gorge, vol. 1, 1951-1961; Animals of East Africa; and Unveiling Man's Origins (with Vanne Goodall). On October 1, 1972, Leakey died in London.
One of Louis's greatest legacies stems from his role in fostering field research of primates in their natural habitats, which he understood as key to unraveling the mysteries of human evolution. He personally chose three female researchers, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas, calling them The Trimates. Each went on to become an important scholar in the field of primatology, immersing themselves in the study of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, respectively. Leakey also encouraged and supported many other Ph. D. candidates, most notably from Cambridge University.
1958. Louis founded the Tigoni Primate Research Center with Cynthia Booth, on her farm north of Nairobi. Later it was the National Primate Research Center, currently the Institute of Primate Research, now in Nairobi. As the Tigoni center, it funded Leakey's Angels.
1961. Louis created the Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology on the same grounds as Coryndon Museum, appointing himself director.
1968. Louis assisted with the founding of The Leakey Foundation, to ensure the legacy of his life's work in the study of human origins. The Leakey Foundation exists today as the number-one funder of human-origins research in the United States.
Louis Leakey was married to Mary Leakey, who made the noteworthy discovery of fossil footprints at Laetoli. Found preserved in volcanic ash in Tanzania, they are the earliest record of bipedal gait.
He is also the father of paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and the botanist Colin Leakey. Louis's cousin, Nigel Gray Leakey, was a recipient of the Victoria Cross during World War II.
