Born August 7, 1903. Kabete (near Nairobi), Kenya
Died October 1, 1972, London, England

Mary Leakey

Born February 6, 1913, London, England
Died December 9, 1996, Nairobi, Kenya

Richard Leakey

Born December 19, 1944, Nairobi, Kenya

When Louis Leakey told his university professors that he wanted to explore East Africa for human fossils, they told him that he was wasting his time. “If you really want to spend your life studying early man,” one of them said, “do it in Asia.” Turn-of-the-century discoveries of 500,000-year-old Peking Man and Java Man had pointed to Asia as the place of man’s origins. But Leakey, who had grown up in Africa and had stumbled upon primitive stone arrowheads and tools during his boyhood wanderings through the Kenyan countryside, felt that he knew better. In time he and his archaeologist wife, Mary, would prove them wrong about man’s...