Louis Leakey
Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was a Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist whose work was important in demonstrating that humans evolved in Africa, particularly through discoveries made at Olduvai Gorge with his wife, fellow palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Having established a programme of palaeoanthropological inquiry in eastern Africa, he also motivated many future generations to continue this scholarly work. Several members of the Leakey family became prominent scholars themselves.
Another of Leakey's legacies stems from his role in fostering field research of primates in their natural habitats, which he saw as key to understanding human evolution. He personally focused on three female researchers, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birutė Galdikas, calling them "The Trimates." Each went on to become an important scholar in the field of primatology. Leakey also encouraged and supported many other PhD candidates, most notably from the University of Cambridge. As well, Leakey played a role in creating organisations for future research in Africa and for protecting wildlife there.
Background
Leakey's parents, Harry and Mary Bazett Leakey, were Church of England missionaries in British East Africa. Harry was the son of James Shirley Leakey, one of the eleven children of the portrait painter James Leakey. Harry Leakey was assigned to an established post of the Church Mission Society among the Kikuyu at Kabete, in the highlands north of Nairobi. The station was at that time a hut and two tents. Leakey's earliest home had an earthen floor, a leaky thatched roof, rodents and insects, and no heating system except for charcoal braziers. The facilities slowly improved over time. The mission, a centre of activity, set up a clinic in one of the tents, and later a girls' school. Harry was working on a translation of the Bible into the Gikuyu language. He had a distinguished career in the CMS, becoming canon of the station.Leakey had a younger brother, Douglas, and two older sisters, Gladys and Julia. Both sisters married missionaries: Gladys married Leonard Beecher, Anglican Bishop of Mombasa and then Archbishop of East Africa from 1960 to 1970; Julia married Lawrence Barham, the second Bishop of Rwanda and Burundi from 1964 to 1966; their son Ken Barham was later the Bishop of Cyangugu in Rwanda.
The Leakey household came to contain Miss Oakes, Miss Higgenbotham, and Mariamu. Leakey grew up, played, and learned to hunt with the native Kikuyus. He also learned to walk with the distinctive gait of the Kikuyu and speak their language fluently, as did his siblings. He was initiated into the Kikuyu ethnic group, an event of which he never spoke, as he was sworn to secrecy.
Leakey requested and was given permission to build and move into a Kikuyu-style hut at the end of the garden. It was home to his personal collection of natural objects, such as birds' eggs and skulls. All the children developed a keen interest in and appreciation of the pristine natural surroundings in which they found themselves. They raised baby animals, later turning them over to zoos. Leakey read a gift book, Days Before History, by H. R. Hall, a juvenile fictional work illustrating the prehistory of Britain. He began to collect tools and was further encouraged in this activity by a role model, Arthur Loveridge, the first curator of the Natural History Museum in Nairobi, the predecessor of the Coryndon Museum. This interest may have predisposed him toward a career in archaeology. His father was also a role model: Canon Leakey co-founded East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society.
Neither Harry nor May were of strong constitution. From 1904 to 1906 the entire family lived back in England, at May's mother's house in Reading, Berkshire, while Harry recovered from neurasthenia, and again in 1911–1913, while May recovered from general frailty and exhaustion. During the latter stay, Harry bought a house in Boscombe, Hampshire.
Formative years
Attendance at Cambridge
In Britain, the Leakey children attended primary school; in Africa, they had a tutor. The family spent World War I in Africa. When the sea lanes opened again in 1919, they returned to Boscombe, and Leakey was sent to Weymouth College, a private boys' school, when he was 16 years old. He did not do well and, in about three years, complained of bullying 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 St John's College, Cambridge. He received a scholarship for his high scores on the entrance exams.Leakey matriculated at the University of Cambridge, his father's alma mater, in 1922, intending to become a missionary to British East Africa.
The resourceful Leakey convinced Cambridge authorities to accept Kikuyu for a modern language requirement, which led to the tall tale that he had "examined himself" in the language.
Archaeological and palaeontological research
In 1922, the British had been awarded German East Africa as part of the settlement of World War I. Within the Tanganyika Territory the Germans had discovered a site rich in dinosaur fossils, Tendaguru. Leakey was told by C. W. Hobley, a friend of the family, that the British Museum of Natural History was going to send a fossil-hunting expedition led by William E. Cutler to the site. Leakey applied and was hired to locate the site and manage the administrative details. In 1924 they departed for Africa. They never found a complete dinosaur skeleton, and Leakey was recalled from the site by Cambridge in 1925.Leakey switched his focus to anthropology, and found a new mentor in Alfred Cort Haddon, head of the Cambridge department. In 1926, Leakey graduated with a "double first", one of the highest degree results awarded, in archaeology and anthropology. He had used some of his preexisting qualifications; for example, Kikuyu was offered and accepted as the second modern language in which he was required to be proficient, even though no one there could test him on it. The university accepted an affidavit from a Kikuyu chief signed with a thumbprint.
From 1925 on Leakey lectured and wrote on African archaeological and palaeontological topics. On graduation he was such a respected figure that Cambridge sent him to East Africa to study prehistoric African humans. He excavated dozens of sites, undertaking for the first time a systematic study of the artefacts. Some of his names for archaeological cultures are still in use; for example, the Elmenteitan.
Research Fellow
In 1927, Leakey received a visit at a site called Gamble's Cave, near Lake Elmenteita, by two women on a holiday, one of whom was Frida Avern. Avern had done some coursework in archaeology. Leakey and Frida began a relationship, which continued upon his return to Cambridge. In 1928, they married and continued work near Lake Elmenteita. Finds from Gamble's Cave were donated by Leakey to the British Museum in 1931. At that time he discovered the Acheulean site of Kariandusi, which he excavated in 1928.On the strength of his work there, he obtained a post-graduate research fellowship at St. John's College and returned to Cambridge in 1929 to classify and prepare the finds from Elmenteita. His patron and mentor at Cambridge was now Arthur Keith. While cleaning two skeletons he had found, he noticed a similarity to one found in Olduvai Gorge by Professor Hans Reck, a German national, whom Leakey had met in 1925 in Germany while on business for Keith.
The geology of Olduvai was known. In 1913, Reck had extricated a skeleton from Bed II in the gorge wall. He argued that it must have the date of the bed, which was believed to be 600,000 years, in the mid-Pleistocene. Early dates for human evolution were not widely accepted at the time, and Reck became involved in a media uproar. He was barred from going back to settle the question by the war and then the terms of the transfer of Tanganyika from Germany to Britain. In 1929, Leakey visited Berlin to talk to the now sceptical Reck. Noting an Acheulean tool in Reck's collection of artefacts from Olduvai, he bet Reck he could find ancient stone tools at Olduvai within 24 hours.
Leakey received his PhD in 1930 at the age of 27. His first child, a daughter named Priscilla Muthoni Leakey, was born in 1931. His headaches and epilepsy returned, and he was prescribed Luminal, which he took for the rest of his life.
Reversals of fortune
Defence of Reck
In November 1931, Leakey led an expedition to Olduvai whose members included Reck, whom Leakey allowed to enter the gorge first. Leakey had bet Reck that Leakey would find Acheulean tools within the first 24 hours, which he did. These verified the provenance of the 1913 find, now called Olduvai Man. Non-humanoid fossils and tools were extracted from the ground in large numbers. Frida delayed joining her husband and was less enthusiastic about him on behalf of Priscilla. She did arrive eventually, however, and Leakey put her to work. Frida's site became FLK, for Frida Leakey's Karongo.In Cambridge, the sceptics were not impressed. To find additional supporting evidence of the antiquity of Reck's Olduvai Man, Leakey returned to Africa, excavating at Kanam and Kanjera. He easily found more fossils, which he named Homo kanamensis. While he was gone, the opposition worked up some "evidence" of the intrusion of Olduvai Man into an earlier layer, evidence that seemed convincing at the time, but is missing and unverifiable now. On his return, Leakey's finds were carefully examined by a committee of 26 scientists and were tentatively accepted as valid.
Scandal
Following their marriage in 1928, Leakey and Frida lived in Foxton near Cambridge. In November 1932, Frida used an inheritance to purchase a large brick-built house in Girton, which the family named "The Close".The following year, Frida was pregnant, suffered from morning sickness most of the time, and was unable to work on the illustrations for Leakey's second book, Adam's Ancestors. At a dinner party given in his honour, after a lecture of his at the Royal Anthropological Institute, Gertrude Caton-Thompson introduced her own illustrator, the twenty-year-old Mary Nicol. Leakey convinced Mary to take on the illustration of his book, and a few months later companionship turned into an affair. Frida gave birth to Colin in December 1933, and the next month Leakey left her and his newborn son. She would not sue for divorce until 1936.
A panel at Cambridge investigated his morals. Grants dried up, but his mother raised enough money for another expedition to Olduvai, Kanam, and Kanjera, the latter two on the Winam Gulf. His previous work there was questioned by P. G. H. Boswell, whom he invited to verify the sites for himself. Arriving at Kanam and Kanjera in 1935, they found that the iron markers Leakey had used to mark the sites had been removed by the Luo tribe for use as spears and the sites could not now be located. To make matters worse, all the photographs Leakey took were ruined by a light leak in the camera. After a frustrating and fruitless two-month search, Boswell left for England, promising, as Leakey understood it, not to publish a word until Leakey returned.
Boswell immediately set out to publish as much as he was able, beginning with a letter in Nature dated 9 March 1935, destroying Reck's and Leakey's dates of the fossils and questioning Leakey's competence. Despite the searches for the iron markers, Boswell averred that "the earlier expedition neither marked the localities on the ground nor recorded the sites on a map." In a field report of March 1935, Leakey accused Boswell of reneging on his word, but Boswell asserted he had made no such promise, and now having public opinion on his side, warned Leakey to withdraw the claim. Leakey was not only forced to retract the accusation in his final field report in June 1935 but also to recant his support of Reck. Leakey was finished at Cambridge: even his mentors turned on him.