A Brill Calendar: August 7

Few early paleo-archaeologists considered Africa as a rich hunting ground for tracing Man’s first appearance on this planet.

In the ‘communis opinio’ of proto-zoologists of that time Asia was considered a much more likely cradle of the species than Africa; for assorted reasons. Three generations of the English Leakey family would change these assumptions; to begin with Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (Kabete, Kenya, August 7 1903 – London, October 1 1972), the son of missionary parents in Eastern Africa. The year Louis died saw the birth of his granddaughter Louise, like her father Richard Leakey (Nairobi, Kenya, December 19 1944) also totally devoted to that part of the African world, and not only as a scholar.

It is seldom that dogged perseverance during more than a quarter-century of digging seemed such a barren pass-time. But the hominid uncovered by Richard’s wife Mary Douglas Nichol (1913 – 1996) in 1959 – one hundred years after Charles Darwin’s seminal book – changed in one fell swoop the destiny of the Leakey breed and the hunt for Homo sapiens’s pedigree. The incredibly rich find by her son Richard and his crew at Koobi Fora, near Lake Turkana in Kenya eight years later, delivered in the decade after 1967 some 400 fossils, probably corresponding to half that number of individuals predecessors.

If you are looking for cautious scholarship, eschewing the glare of publicity, you are well-advised to consider the advances in paleo-archaeology that have no direct relation to the Leakey family. However, its flamboyant saga represents a microcosm of the 20th century history of the ‘Dark Continent’, including protection of continental wild-life and ecosystems.