The British anthropologist Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-1972) made major contributions to the study of prehistoric man.

The parents of L. S. B. Leakey were British missionaries who settled at Kabete, Kenya, near Nairobi, in 1901. Leakey was born on Aug. 7, 1903, in Kabete, where he formed lifelong friendships with boys of the Kikuyu tribe, with whom he grew up. He is probably the only white man to have been initiated from youth to manhood in a Kikuyu ceremony.

After World War I Leakey went briefly to school at Weymouth College, Dorset, England, and in 1922 he entered St. John's College, Cambridge University. In 1923 he organized an expedition of the British Museum to search for dinosaurs in southern Tanganyika.

In 1926, after qualifying in anthropology at Cambridge, Leakey organized and led four East African archeological expeditions. During the third expedition, in 1931, after some very important discoveries of the earliest known (at that...