LEAKEY, LOUIS S.B.

born Aug. 7, 1903, Kabete, Kenya died Oct. 1, 1972, London, Eng. in full Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey Kenyan archaeologist and anthropologist whose fossil discoveries in East Africa proved that man was far older than had previously been believed and that human evolution was centred in Africa, rather than in Asia, as earlier discoveries had suggested. Leakey was also noted for his controversial interpretations of these archaeological finds. Born of British missionary parents, Leakey spent his youth with the Kikuyu people of Kenya, about whom he later wrote. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and began his archaeological research in East Africa in 1924; he was later aided by his second wife, the archaeologist Mary Douglas Leakey (ne Nicol), and their sons. He held various appointments at major British and American universities and was curator of the Coryndon Memorial Museum in Nairobi from 1945 to 1961. In 1931 Leakey began his research at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, which became the site of his most famous discoveries. The first finds were of animal fossils and crude stone tools, but in 1959 Mary Leakey uncovered a fossil hominid that was given the name Zinjanthropus (now generally regarded as a form of /a>Australopithecus) and was believed to be about 1.7 million years old. Leakey later theorized that Zinjanthropus, or Australopithecus, was not a direct ancestor of modern man; he claimed this distinction for other hominid fossil remains that his team had discovered at Olduvai Gorge in 196063 and which Leakey named /a>Homo habilis. Leakey held that H. habilis lived contemporaneously with Australopithecus in East Africa and represented a more advanced hominid on the direct evolutionary line to Homo sapiens. Initially many scientists disputed Leakey's interpretations and classifications of the fossils he had found, although they accepted the significance of the finds themselves. They contended that H. habilis was not sufficiently different from Australopithecus to justify a separate classification. Subsequent finds by the Leakey family and others, however, established that H. habilis does indeed represent the evolutionary link between the australopithecines (who eventually became extinct) and Homo erectus, who was the direct ancestor of modern man. Among the other important finds made by Leakey's team was the discovery in 1948 at Rusinga, an island in Lake Victoria, Kenya, of the remains of Proconsul africanus, a common ancestor of both humans and apes that lived about 25 million years ago. At Fort Ternan, east of Lake Victoria, in 1962, Leakey's team discovered the remains of Kenyapithecus, another link between apes and early man that lived about 14 million years ago. Leakey's discoveries formed the basis for the most important subsequent research into the earliest origins of human life. He was also instrumental in persuading Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey to undertake their pioneering long-term studies of chimpanzees and gorillas in those animals' natural habitats. The Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory was founded by his son Richard as a fossil repository and postgraduate study centre and laboratory. Leakey wrote Adam's Ancestors (1934; rev. ed., 1953), Stone-Age Africa (1936), White African (1937), Olduvai Gorge (1952), Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (1952), Olduvai Gorge, 195161 (1965), Unveiling Man's Origins (1969; with Jane Goodall), and Animals of East Africa (1969).