Louis Leakey

Louis Leakey (1903-1972), British-Kenyan paleoanthropologist noted for his discoveries of fossil remains that greatly advanced the study of human evolution. Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was born in Kabete, Kenya, the son of English missionary parents, and raised among the Kikuyu people; he later wrote a definitive study of their culture. Leakey was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he eventually earned a doctorate in anthropology. At the age of 20 he interrupted his formal education to return to Africa as a member of a British Museum fossil-reptile expedition to Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

Beginning in 1926, Leakey led expeditions to Olduvai, a river gorge in Tanganyika where he found important fossils and Stone Age tools. In 1948 he reported the finding in Kenya of a 20-million-year-old skull, which he named Proconsul africanus. Though it is now regarded to be too specialized to have been a direct ancestor of current ape and human populations, Proconsul is still considered a valuable model for what such an ancestor might have been like. Leakey’s other important discoveries include the 1.75-million-year-old fossil hominid Zinjanthropus (now believed to be a form of Australopithecus), which was found in 1959 at Olduvai by his wife and partner, Mary Douglas Leakey, and the 1960 discovery of Homo habilis (Latin for “handy man”), which Leakey claimed as the first member of the true human genus and the first true toolmaker. While the exact interpretation of Leakey’s fossil finds is still in debate, their significance to the field of physical anthropology is universally acknowledged.

In the later years of his career, Leakey became increasingly interested in primate behavior. He helped to engineer the funding and recruitment of groundbreaking research including projects by Jane Goodall, who worked with chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania; Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda; and Birute Galdikas Brindamour, who researched orangutans in the Sarawak region of Indonesia. Louis Leakey’s books include Stone Age Africa (1936) and Olduvai Gorge, 1951-61 (1965).

See also Anthropology; Human Evolution.