Leakey Family

Paleoanthropology can be defined as the study of the chronology, remains, physical structure and habitats of early hominids. The fields of anthropology and paleoanthropology have been dominated by one family name since the 1930's, the Leaky family. Three generations of the Leakey family have been piecing together the story of our origins for over six decades.

The patriarch of the family is Louis S.B. Leakey who was a paleontologist, an archaeologist and an anthropologist. He was born in Kenya in 1903 where he lived with his parents among Kenya's largest tribe. He attended college at the University of Cambridge and in 1924 during a break from his studies due to an injury; he went on an archeological expedition to Africa and was hooked. He led four fossil hunting expeditions there. He returned to Cambridge and completed his degree in both Archaeology and Anthropology in 1926. During a fellowship at St. John's College he published his first book, The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony, which was about his extensive fieldwork in Africa during his expeditions. With the notoriety that he was receiving, Louis obtained a grant and went to Olduvai Gorge in 1931. He was determined to prove his theory that Africa was where our ancestors originated. He spent his first twenty years there without any significant findings, but did find many fossils and Stone Age tools. Louis married Mary Nicol in 1937 and she shared a mutual desire with him to find the origins of man.

Mary Leakey was born Mary Douglas Nicol in London in 1913. From a very young age she traveled with her parents and was exposed to many prehistoric sites. These sites made her very interested in pursuing a career in Geology and Archaeology. When she met Louis she had already become an expert at illustrating the finds at archaeological digs at the age of twenty. They had three sons: Jonathan in 1940, Richard in 1944, and Philip in 1948. During the Leakey's expeditions Mary discovered Proconsul Africanus in 1948 and in 1949 she reconstructed a hominid skull Zinjanthropus boisei which is now known as Australopithecus boisei. This skull discovery significantly changed the timeline of human evolution and enabled the Leakeys to receive funding from the National Geographic Society. By 1961 Mary had discovered Homo habilis and she was living in Olduvai without Louis who visited occasionally. Louis spent the remainder of his life travelling around the world promoting their projects and raising money. He passed away in London on October 1, 1972. She continued their work and during the 1970s Mary and her team discovered the remains of 25 early hominids, a vast quantity of fossils, 15 new animal species and an 89 foot long trail of early footprints. The prints were well-preserved and dated back 3.6 mya in Laetoli. This discovery proved that our ancestors practiced bipedal locomotion. Mary retired in 1983 and continued her passion by writing articles about her life and discoveries. Mary passed away in 1993.

Louis and Mary's second son, Richard was born in 1944. He found his first fossil at the age of six which was part of an extinct pig. From 1968 to 1989, Richard was the director of the National Museum of Kenya and led his first expedition in 1968. During that time he coordinated at field expeditions of the shores of Lake Turkana. With his team he found Stone Age tools that dated back 1.9 mya, skulls of Homo habilis and Homo erectus, the remains of a Robust australopithecines and the most famous discovery of an almost complete skeleton of a Homo erectus youth dating back 1.6 mya. The skeleton has been named Turkana Boy. In 1970 he married a fellow palaeontologist Meave Epps and they had two children, Louise in 1972 and Samira in 1974. In 1989 he became the director of the Kenya Wildlife Service where he was unable to continue fieldwork. In this position, he oversaw efforts to end elephant poaching. He then went on to become involved the Kenyan parliament in 1997, he was appointed Head of Kenya's Civil Service