Richard Leakey

Scientist: Richard Erskine Leakey

Kenyan anthropologist (1944–)

Richard Leakey was born at Nairobi in Kenya, the son of the famous scholars Louis and Mary Leakey. Having left school at sixteen, he first worked as a hunter and animal collector before turning in 1964 to the search for fossil humans. His parents had spent much of their lives exploring the Rift Valley and working at Olduvai in Northern Tanzania.

In contrast Leakey undertook his first field trip to the Omo valley in Ethiopia. In 1965 he shifted his interest to Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, concentrating his work in the Koobi Fora area. At the same time he was appointed to the directorship of the Kenya National Museum, Nairobi.

In 1972 he made his first major find at Koobi Fora. This was a skull with a brain capacity of about 800 cc, given the number 1470. Leakey identified 1470 as Homo rather than an australopithecine precursor, and took it to be Homo habilis. The age of the skull, however, was in dispute varying from 1.8 to 2.4 million years; the former age was eventually accepted.

In 1975 a second skull was found, this time Homo erectus, a more advanced form than 1470. By this time Leakey was finding that the demands of administration, producing TV series, and writing popular accounts of his work were limiting his research activities. Moreover, he suffered the onset of kidney failure in 1979. The donation of a kidney by his brother Philip restored Leakey to what he termed in his autobiography One Life (1983), the beginning of his “second life.” Much of this second life has been devoted to conservation and Leakey has been a leading figure in the fight to preserve the African elephant by banning the trade in ivory. In 1990 he was appointed director and executive chairman of the Kenyan Wildlife Service.

However, during his fight against ivory smugglers, Leakey made many enemies. His determination, outspokenness, and ruthlessness alienated him from many leading Kenyan politicians and administrators. Consequently, in 1994, he resigned his post with the Kenyan Wildlife Service and decided to enter politics, despite an airplane crash in 1993 that led to the amputation of both legs. In 1995 Leakey formed a new political party, Safina (Noah's Ark), and announced his intention to challenge the ruling KANU (Kenya African National Union) in the next elections.

Throughout his career Leakey has described the development of humans in terms similar to those adopted by his father. He has rejected the claims of Don Johanson that ‘Lucy’, Australopithecus afarensis, is a joint ancestor of Homo as well as the australopithecines first described by Raymond Dart. Leakey has continued to claim that it is too simple to present the human evolutionary tree as having only two branches; rather, there were at least three, and it was more than likely that future discoveries would add to the number. Human evolution, for Leakey, seems more like a bush than a tree.

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Biography: Richard Erskine Frere Leakey

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Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (born 1944), a leading Kenyan researcher in human prehistory and wildlife conservationist, was responsible for many of the most important discoveries pertaining to early human evolution.

Richard Erskine Frere Leakey, the second son of Louis and Mary Leakey, was born in Nairobi on December 19, 1944. His father, Louis Leakey, was born in Kenya of British missionary parents. Louis grew up among the Kikuyu and differed from most British colonists in considering himself an African, as opposed to a European living in Africa. Likewise, Richard was a Kenyan; he mastered Kiswahili earlier than English and became a Kenyan citizen. As a child, he frequently accompanied his famous parents on their archaeological and paleontological expeditions. In the late 1940s, they were working at Miocene ape sites on Lake Victoria, and by the age of six Richard learned to help collect skeletal material. He was educated through secondary school in Nairobi. After leaving school, he briefly made a living trapping and selling animals and acting as a safari guide for visitors to Olduvai Gorge, his parents' site. He began a safari business in 1962 that lasted under different partners until 1974. However, he continued to work for his parents at Olduvai and soon organized expeditions of his own.

Feeling the need for formal training in anthropology and paleontology, Leakey prepared for university work, passing A level examinations in London. However, he eventually declined a British university education, not wishing to spend the time away from field work in East Africa. He married Margaret Cropper in 1966 and they had one daughter, Anna. Later divorced, he married Meave Epps in 1970. They had two daughters, Louise and Samira.

Although initially vowing never to work with fossils, Leakey is associated with the recovery of some of the most important specimens in human evolutionary studies. He gained his knowledge of paleoanthropology from working for his parents and later from colleagues he had brought together to study the remains recovered by his Kenyan research team. Leakey organized his first expedition in 1964 to Lake Natron in Tanzania, north of Olduvai Gorge. This work resulted in the discovery of the Peninj mandible, the lower jaw of a robust australopithecine, Austral-opithecus boisei, an extinct side branch of the human lineage. The Lake Natron work was soon followed by excavations at Lake Baringo, Kenya, in 1966, and major involvement in the multinational Omo expedition in Ethiopia, both of which yielded hominid and other fossils.

Leakey's most famous contributions to paleoanthropology derived from his work at Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, particularly at the site of Koobi Fora on its eastern shore, where many Plio-Pleistocene hominids have been discovered. Leakey and his team began working at East Turkana in 1968 and within weeks found their first hominid specimen, an A. boisei mandible. The wealth of hominid fossils that were later found on both shores of Lake Turkana by Leakey's team revolutionized human evolutionary studies. Among the most famous of the finds are ER 1470, a large-brained member of the genus Homo dated to 1.8 million years; several of the earliest known members of the taxon Homo erectus (modern human's immediate ancestor) dated to between 1.6 and 1 million years; and the "Black Skull," dated to 2.6 million years, a robust australopithecine that has forced recent revisions of the human family tree. Among the most impressive of the Homo erectus fossils is the Nariokotome specimen, found in 1984 by Leakey's team on the west shore of Lake Turkana. It is the virtually complete skeleton of a 12-year-old boy who was close to six feet tall. Despite its height, the boy had a small brain, providing evidence that human cranial expansion is not simply an artifact of increases in body size. Work continued into the 1990s at Lake Turkana, which became a permanent research facility.

Although renowned as a paleoanthropologist, Leakey's greatest contributions to African prehistory derived from his skill as an administrator and organizer who combined international involvement with the training of native Kenyans. Leakey formed international, multidisciplinary teams to recover early human fossil remains and artifacts, properly analyze them, determine their age, and ascertain the environmental circumstances surrounding their lives and deaths. Moreover, he trained many other Kenyans and made them instrumental to the research efforts in both the field and the laboratory. He became administrative director of the National Museums of Kenya in 1968 and director in 1974. Along with the trustees of the National Museums of Kenya, he established and obtained funding for the International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory. Through books, lectures, and his television series for the BBC (British Broadcasting Channel), he played an important role in popularizing research in African paleoanthropology and in explaining its significance to the public.

Leakey also emphasized wildlife conservation and applied his organizational ability to conservation efforts both in Kenya and abroad. He was politically involved and held positions in the Kenyan government, including director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, in which he tried to curb the poaching activities that threatened many African species with extinction. He was particularly concerned with the problem of elephant poaching and was instrumental in efforts to eliminate this activity. In spite of periods of poor health, in particular kidney failure and a transplant in 1980 and a devastating plane crash in 1993 that resulted in the partial loss of his lower limbs, Leakey continued to pursue his scientific interests and his commitments to the environment and the Kenyan nation.

In the spring of 1994, Leakey resigned from his post as director of the Kenya Wildlife Service after being accused by the government of favoring wildlife conservation over the interests of local farmers, and confirmed his place in the Kenyan political arena by starting a political party called Safina - Swahili for Noah's Ark - that was opposed to the ruling party. Safina, which united Kenya's half-dozen smaller opposition groups, favored a democratic Kenya over the present, one-party system ruled by Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi. The party began work to support a single presidential candidate for the 1997 elections. Leakey, in his new and strong political role, was a likely presidential candidate.

Richard Leakey
Born	19 December 1944 (1944-12-19) Nairobi, Kenya
Nationality	Kenyan
Fields	paleoanthropology

Early life

Earliest years

As a small boy Richard lived in Nairobi with his parents, Louis Leakey, curator of the Coryndon Museum, and Mary Leakey, director of the Leakey excavations at Olduvai, and his two brothers, Jonathan and Philip. The Leakey brothers had a very active childhood. All the boys had ponies and belonged to the Langata Pony Club. They participated in jumping and steeplechase competitions but often rode for fun across the plains to the Ngong Hills, chasing and playing games with the animals. Sometimes the whole club were guests at the Leakeys for holidays and vacations. Richard's parents founded the Dalmatian Club of East Africa and won a prize in 1957. Dogs and many other pets shared the Leakey home. The Leakey boys participated in games conducted by both adults and children, in which they tried to imitate early man, catching springhares and small antelope by hand on the Serengeti. They drove lions and jackals from the kill to see if they could do it.^[1]

Broken leg

When Richard was 11, he fell from his horse, fractured his skull and lay near death. Coincidentally it was this incident that saved his parents' marriage. Louis was seriously considering leaving Mary for his secretary, Rosalie Osborn. As the battle with Mary raged in the household, Richard begged his father from his sickbed not to leave. That was the deciding factor. Louis broke up with Rosalie and the family lived in happy harmony for a few years more.^[2]

Duke of York Secondary School

The Leakey boys had several nannies like their father before them. At age 11 Richard entered the Duke of York Secondary School (later known as Lenana School). The Mau Mau rebellion was just winding down, the settlers believed they had won a victory, and the mood reflected that struggle and that belief.^[3] On his first day Richard advocated for racial equality, like his father. Calling him a "lover of niggers", the other students locked him in a wire cage, spat and urinated on him and poked him with sticks. The school administration blamed Richard. After he was later caned for missing chapel, Richard resolved never to be a Christian.

Circumstances such as these do not favour a successful academic career; in effect, Richard was denied a formal education. He skipped class frequently in favour of a business he started, selling small animals to be photographed by Des Bartlett. In December, 1960, Richard reached his 16th birthday and promptly quit the Duke of York. His parents gave him a choice: return to school or support himself.

Teenage entrepreneur

Richard chose to support himself, borrowed 500 pounds from his parents for a Land Rover, and went into the trapping and skeleton supply business with Kamoya Kimeu. Already a skilled horseman, outdoorsman, Land Rover mechanic, archaeologist and expedition leader, he learned to identify bones, skills which all pointed to a path he did not yet wish to take, simply because his father was on it.^[4]

The bone business turned into a safari business in 1961. In 1962 he obtained a private airplane pilot license and took tours to Olduvai. It was from a casual aerial survey that he noted the potential of Lake Natron's shores for paleontology. He went looking for fossils in a Land Rover, but could find none, until his parents assigned Glynn Isaac to go with him. Louis was so impressed with their finds that he gave them National Geographic money for a month's expedition.^[5] They explored in the vicinity of Peninj near the lake, where Richard was in charge of the administrative details. Bored, he returned to Nairobi temporarily, but at that moment, Kimoya Kameu discovered a fossil of Australopithecus boisei. A second expedition left Richard feeling that he was being excluded from the most significant part of the operation, the scientific analysis.

Marriage to Margaret Cropper

In 1964 on his second Lake Natron expedition, Richard met an archaeologist named Margaret Cropper. When Margaret returned to England, Richard decided to follow suit to study for a degree and become better acquainted with her. He completed his high school requirements in six months; meanwhile Margaret obtained her degree at the University of Edinburgh. He passed the entrance exams for admission to college, but in 1965 he and Margaret decided to get married and return to Kenya. His father offered him a job at Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology. He worked for it, excavating at Lake Baringo and continued his photographic safari business, making enough money to buy a house in Karen, a pleasant suburb of Nairobi. Their daughter Anna was born in 1969, the same year that Richard and Margaret divorced. He married his colleague Meave Epps in 1970 and they had two daughters, Samira (born 1972) and Louise (1974) ^[6].

Paleontology

Richard’s career as a palaeoanthropologist did not begin with a dateable event or a sudden decision, as did Louis’; he was with his parents on every excavation, was taught every skill and was given responsible work even as a boy. It is not surprising that his independent decision making led him into conflict with his father, who had always tried to instill in him that very trait. After he gave some fossils to Tanzania and set Margaret to inventory Louis’ collections, Louis suggested he find work elsewhere in 1967.

Richard formed the Kenya Museum Associates (now Kenya Museum Society)with influential Kenyans in that year. Their intent was to 'Kenyanize' and improve the National Museum. They offered the museum 5000 pounds, 1/3 of its yearly budget, if it would place Richard in a responsible position. He was given an observer’s seat on the board of directors. Joel Ojal, the government official in charge of the museum, and a member of the Associates, directed the chairman of the board to start placing Kenyans on it.

The Omo

Plans for the museum had not matured when Louis, intentionally or not, found a way to remove his confrontational son from the scene. Louis attended a lunch with Haile Selassie and Jomo Kenyatta. The conversation turned to fossils and Haile wanted to know why none had been found in Ethiopia. Louis developed this inquiry into permission to excavate on the Omo River.

The expedition consisted of three contingents: French, under Camille Arambourg, American, under Clark Howell, and Kenyan, led by Richard. Louis could not go because of his arthritis. Crossing the Omo in 1967, Richard’s contingent was attacked by crocodiles, which destroyed their wooden boat. Expedition members barely escaped with their lives. Richard radioed Louis for a new, aluminum boat, which the National Geographic Society was happy to supply.

On site, Kamoya Kimeu found a Hominid fossil. Richard took it to be Homo erectus, but Louis identified it as Homo sapiens. It was the oldest of the species found at that time, dating to 160,000 years, and was the first contemporaneous with Homo neanderthalensis. During the identification process, Richard came to feel that the college men were patronizing him.^[7]

Koobi Fora

During the Omo expedition of 1967, Richard visited Nairobi and on the return flight the pilot flew over Lake Rudolph (now Lake Turkana) to avoid a thunderstorm. The map led Richard to expect volcanic rock below him but he saw sediments. Visiting the region with Howell by helicopter, he saw tools and fossils everywhere. In his mind, he was already formulating a new enterprise.

In 1968 Louis and Richard attended a meeting of the Research and Exploration Committee of the National Geographic Society to ask for money for Omo. Catching Louis by surprise, Richard asked the committee to divert the $25,000 intended for Omo to new excavations to be conducted under his leadership at Koobi Fora. Richard won, but chairman Leonard Carmichael told him he'd better find something or never "come begging at our door again." Louis graciously congratulated Richard.

More was yet to come. By now the board of the National Museum was packed with Kenyan supporters of Richard. They appointed him administrative director. The curator, Robert Carcasson, resigned in protest and Richard was left with the museum at his command, which he, like Louis before him, used as a base of operations.^[8] Although there was friendly rivalry and contention between Louis and Richard, relations remained good. Each took over for the other when one was busy with something else or incapacitated, and Richard continued to inform his father immediately of Hominid finds.

In the first expedition to Allia Bay on Lake Turkana, where the Koobi Fora camp came to be located, Richard hired only graduate students in anthropology, as he did not want any questioning of his leadership. The students were John Harris and Bernard Wood. Also present was a team of Africans under Kamoya, a geochemist: Paul Abel, and a photographer: Bob Campbell. Margaret was the archaeologist. Richard took to smoking a pipe to enhance his status, as did Kamoya. There were no leadership problems. In contrast to his father, Richard ran a disciplined and tidy camp, although in order to find fossils, he did push the expedition harder than it wished.

In 1969 the discovery of a cranium of Paranthropus boisei caused great excitement. A Homo habilis skull (KNM ER 1470) and a Homo erectus skull (KNM ER 3733), discovered in 1972 and 1975, respectively, were among the most significant finds of Leakey's earlier expeditions. In 1978 an intact cranium of Homo erectus (KNM ER 3883) was discovered.

Leakey was diagnosed with a terminal kidney disease in 1969. Ten years later he became seriously ill but received a kidney transplant from his brother, Philip and recovered to full health ^[6].

Leakey and Donald Johanson were at the time considered to be the most famous palaeoanthoropologists, and scientifically their views on human evolution were differing, a scientific rivalry that gained public attention. This culminated at the Cronkite's Universe talk show hosted by Walter Cronkite in New York in 1981, where Leakey and Johanson held a fierce debate on live TV show ^[9].

West Turkana

Turkana Boy, discovered by Kamoya Kimeu, a member of Leakeys' team in 1984 - was the nearly complete skeleton of a 12-year-old (or possibly 9-year-old) Homo erectus who died 1.6 million years ago. Leakey and Roger Lewin describe the experience of this find and their interpretation of it, in their book Origins Reconsidered (1992). Shortly after the discovery of Turkana Boy, Leakey and his team made the discovery of a skull (KNM WT 17000, known as ”Black Skull”) of a new species, Australopithecus aethiopicus (or Paranthropus aethiopicus).

Richard shifted away from paleontology in 1989, but his wife Meave Leakey and daughter Louise Leakey still continue paleontological research in Northern Kenya.

Conservation

In 1989 Richard Leakey was appointed the head of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department (WMCD) by President Daniel arap Moi in response to the international outcry over the poaching of elephants and the impact it was having on the wildlife of Kenya. The department was replaced by Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) in 1990, and Leakey became its first chairman. With characteristically bold steps Leakey created special, well-armed anti-poaching units that were authorized to shoot poachers on sight. The poaching menace was dramatically reduced. Impressed by Leakey's transformation of the KWS, the World Bank approved grants worth $140 million. Richard Leakey, President Arap Moi and the WMCD made the international news headlines when a stock pile of 12 tons of ivory was burned in 1989 in Nairobi National Park.

Richard Leakey's confrontational approach to the issue of human-wildlife conflict in national parks did not win him only friends. His view was that parks were self-contained ecosystems that had to be fenced in and the humans kept out. Leakey's bold and incorruptible nature also offended many local politicians.

In 1993 Richard Leakey lost both his legs when his propeller-driven plane crashed. Sabotage was suspected but never proved. In a few months Richard Leakey was walking again on artificial limbs. Around this time the Kenyan government announced that a secret probe had found evidence of corruption and mismanagement in the KWS. An annoyed Leakey resigned publicly in a press conference in January 1994. He was replaced by David Western as the head of the KWS.

Richard Leakey wrote about his experiences at the KWS in his book Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya's Elephants (2001).

Politics

In May 1995 Richard Leakey joined a group of Kenyan intellectuals in launching a new political party - the Safina Party, which in Swahili means "Noah's Ark." "If KANU and Mr. Moi will do something about the deterioration of public life, corruption and mismanagement, I'd be happy to fight alongside them. If they won't, I want somebody else to do it," announced Richard Leakey. The Safina party was routinely harassed and even its application to become an official political party was not approved until 1997.

In 1999, Moi had to appoint Richard Leakey as Cabinet Secretary and overall head of the civil service at the insistence of international donor institutions as a pre-condition for the resumption of donor funds. Leakey's second stint in the civil service lasted until 2001 when he was forced to resign again.

Later activities

Leakey joined the Department of Anthropology faculty at Stony Brook University, New York in 2002^[10]. He is currently a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook, where he is Chair of the Turkana Basin Institute.

In 2004, Richard Leakey founded and chaired WildlifeDirect, a Kenya-based charitable organization. The charity was established to provide support to conservationists in Africa directly on the ground via the use of blogs. This enables individuals anywhere to play a direct and interactive role in the survival of some of the world’s most precious species. The organisation played a significant role in the saving of Congo's mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park in January 2007 after a rebel uprising threatened to eliminate the highly vulnerable population.

In April 2007 he was appointed interim chairman of Transparency International Kenya branch ^[11].

Bibliography

Leakey's early published works include: Origins and The People of the Lake (both with Roger Lewin as co-author); The Illustrated Origin of Species; and The Making of Mankind (1981). Leakey had an open scientific rivalry with Donald Johanson during the 80's.

Origins (with Roger Lewin) (Dutton, 1977)
People of the Lake: Mankind and its Beginnings (with Roger Lewin)(Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978)
Making of Mankind (Penguin USA, 1981)
One Life: An Autobiography (Salem House, 1983)
Origins Reconsidered (with Roger Lewin)(Doubleday, 1992)
The Origin of Humankind (Perseus Books Group, 1994)
The Sixth Extinction (with Roger Lewin) (Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1995)
Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (with Virginia Morell) (St. Martin's Press, 2001)

References

^ Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions, Copyright 1995, Chapter 18, "Richard Makes his Move".
^ Morell, Chapter 17, "Chimpanzees and Other Loves."
^ Within a few years the settlers would be stampeding out of the country at the political victory of Jomo Kenyatta and the independence of Kenya.
^ Richard E. Leakey, The Making of Mankind, Copyright 1981, Chapter 1 Page 1. He says he wished to be "free" of his parents' world, a sentiment both Louis and Mary must have understood very well, even though they opposed his freedom.
^ Morell, Chapter 18, "Richard Makes his Move." Besides Richard and Glynn, the roster included Barbara Isaac, Philip Leakey, Hugo van Lawick and six of Mary's African assistants.
^ ^a ^b Talk Origins - Richard Leakey
^ This section is based on Morell Chapter 20, “To the Omo.”
^ Morell, Chapter 21, "Breaking Away."
^ Roger Lewin: Bones of Contention University of Chicago Press, 1997. ISBN 0226476510
^ Stony Brook University, Press release, Mar 27, 2007: World-Renowned Anthropologist Richard Leakey to be Honored at Stony Brook University's 50th Anniversary Gala April 11
^ The Standard, April 4, 2007: Leakey takes over at TI

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Persondata
NAME	Leakey, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Paleontologist, archaeologist and conservationist
DATE OF BIRTH	December 19, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH	Nairobi, Kenya
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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