Anthropologists Louis Leakey 1903-1969 Mary Leakey 1913-1996

Louis and Mary Leakey were a husband-and-wife anthropology team that contributed much to the modern understanding of human origins. Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was born in 1903 outside Nairobi, Kenya. He was sufficiently integrated into the local life there that he was accepted as one of the tribe of the Kikuyu people and learned their language first. To fulfill the foreign-language requirement at Cambridge University, Leakey was permitted to test himself on Kikuyu, as nobody else was qualified. At Cambridge, he specialized in archaeology and anthropology, receiving a Ph.D. in 1930. He discovered what he considered to be the oldest known human fossils in 1931, but a combination of poor notes and a shoddy understanding of geology prevented him from reliably identifying them.

This error precipitated a series of strong criticisms of Leakey's methods from a number...