The Leakey Family
Louis and Mary Leakey and their son Richard are noted paleoanthropologists whose research in the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa advanced the study of human evolution. All of English descent, they lived and conducted their research in Kenya and spent much of their lives hunting fossils throughout East Africa. Until the 1940s and 1950s when the Leakeys made their discoveries, scientists believed that modern humans descended from a single evolutionary chain that evolved in East Africa. The Leakeys discovered a series of fossils that indicated that different types of early humans coexisted in East Africa, which put kinks in the theory of a single evolutionary chain (Johanson). Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, a British-Kenyan paleoanthropologist noted for his discoveries of fossil remains that greatly advanced the study of human evolution. The son of English missionary parents, Leakey was born in Kabete, Kenya, and raised among the Kikuyu people; he later wrote a definitive study of their culture. Louis was initiated by tribal elders into the native Kikuyu society. As a young man he was adventurous, impulsive, driven, ruggedly handsome and romantically African. Leakey was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he eventually earned
The elder Leakeys, whose discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania revolutionized theories of early human evolution, often took Richard with them on their fossil-hunting expeditions (Morell). 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. In 1984 one of Leakey's expeditions discovered an almost complete skeleton of an adolescent boy at Nariokotome on the western shore of Lake Turkana. In 1948 he reported the finding in Kenya of a 20-million-year-old skull, which he named Proconsul africanus. He also wrote an autobiography, One Life in 1984 (Leakey R. Including the one which resulted in the 1999 discovery of a 3. The daughter of a landscape painter, Mary was born in England but traveled abroad during much of her childhood. Louise attended the University of Bristol for her undergraduate studies, where she received a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology and Biology. Carrying the Leakey legacy forward into yet another generation is Louise Leakey. She has written more than fifty scientific articles and books, and continues to be a highly visible and significant contributor to the study of human origins (Johanson). in Zoology from the University of North Wales.
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