Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett

Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett

(b. Kabete, Kenya, 7 August 1903; d. London, England, 1 October 1972)

archaeology, human paleontology, anthropology.

Leakey was the son of Canon Leakey of the Church Missionary Society in Kenya and was brought up with the native Kikuyu. After attending Weymouth College he went to St. John’s College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in archaeology and anthropology and took his Ph.D. in African prehistory. He then became a research fellow of the college and, in 1966, an honorary fellow. His interests in prehistory and ethnology were stimulated by M. C. Burkitt and A. C. Haddon. He was a member of the British Museum East African Expedition to Tanganyika in 1924 and from 1926 led his own East African archaeological research expeditions. Leakey’s important discoveries about the prehistory of East Africa and his discovery of early hominids were published in The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya (1931), The Stone Age Races of Kenya (1935), and Stone-Age Africa (1936).

His archaeological and paleontological work did not detract from his interest in Kenya and its politics, an interest which his close association with the Kikuyu made him particularly well equipped to pursue, as can be seen from his autobiographical White African (1937. The results of his research for the Rhodes Trustees into the customs of the Kikuyu tribe (1937-1939) are in press. At the outbreak of World War II he was in charge of special branch 6 of the Criminal Investigation Department in Nairobi; he continued as a handwriting expert to the department until 1951.

At the end of the war he returned to his archaeological and paleontological researches, as curator of the Coryndon Memorial Museum, Nairobi (1945-1961), and later as honorary director of the National Centre of Prehistory and Paleontology in Nairobi, and on behalf of various research foundations. He founded the Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, of which he was general secretary (1947-1951) and president (1955-1959). On periods of leave during the war Leakey and his second wife, the former Mary Douglas Nicol, discovered the Acheulean site of Olorgesailie in the Rift Valley. He continued his researches after the war. His work on the Miocene deposits of western Kenya produced among other discoveries the almost complete skull of Proconsul africanus, the earliest ape yet found.

Financed largely by the National Geographic Society of Washington, Leakey and his family, beginning in 1959, undertook large-scale work at Olduvai. There, in their first season, Mary Leakey found the skull of Australopithecus (Zinjmuhropus) boisei; and in 1960 their son Jonathan discovered the first remains of Homo habilis, a hominid dated by the potassium-argon method at 1.7 million years. Also in 1960 Leakey discovered the skull of one of the makers of the Acheulean culture at Olduvai, which he named Homo erectus. These remarkable researches have been published and are still being published in a series of books entitled Olduvai Gorge. After his death his work was continued by his wife and his son Richard, who just before his father’s death was able to show him the remains of a human being found on the shores of Lake Rudolf below a tufa dated at 2.6 million years.

Charles Darwin speculated that Africa might be the continent where man had emerged; and Leakey’s fieldwork seems to have shown this guess to be a sound one. After his death the Kenya authorities established a museum and research institute which they propose to call The Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory.

A man of very wide interests and a great lover of both domestic and wild animals, Leakey was a trustee of the National Parks of Kenya and of the Kenya Wild Life Society and president of the East African Kennel Club. An enthusiastic and inspiring teacher, he was keen to demonstrate flint knapping, a technique he had learnt from Llewellyn Jewitt’ account of the methods used by the nineteenth-century flint forger Edward Simpson, and from watching the knappers at Brandon in Suffolk. He traveled extensively, lecturing to large European and American audiences, and worked tirelessly to disseminate knowledge of his discoveries. His enthusiasm, it was claimed, often carried him to extremes. Although intolerant of opposing views that he considered ill-informed, he realized that, in his field, it was necessary to be a competent archaeologist, human paleontologist, zoologist, anatomist, and geologist’and hardly anyone could be expert in all of them. Many of his discoveries were controversial but his persistence and faith were amply justified. No one has hitherto contributed more to the direct discovery of early man and his ancient culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A complete list of Leakey’s published works will appear in his biography, now being written by Sonia Cole. On his early life, see White African (1937);a sequel is in press.

In addition to works cited in the text, Leakey’s books include Adam’s Ancestors (London, 1934); Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (London, 1936); The Miocene Hominoidea of East Africa (London, 1951), written with W. E. Le Gros Clark;Oldurai Gorge (Cambridge, 1951); Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London, 1952); Animals in Africa (London, 1953), a book of photographs by Ylla to which Leakey contributed the text; and Defeating Mau Mau (London, 1954).

Glyn Daniel