Louis Leakey

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Louis Leakey

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (born August 7, 1903 in the Kabete Mission near Nairobi / Kenya , † October 1, 1972 in London ) was a British-born Kenyan paleoanthropologist .

He was married to Mary Leakey for the second time ; their sons Richard and Jonathan also became well-known palaeoanthropologists. In 1960 Louis Leakey motivated Jane Goodall to research the behavior of wild apes ( chimpanzees ) - as did Dian Fossey ( gorillas ) and Birutė Galdikas ( orangutans ).

Career

Louis Leakey grew up as a child of English missionaries bilingual ( Kikuyu and English ) among members of the Kikuyu tribe and at the age of 13 became an initiated member of the Kikuyu tribe.

As a child, his interest in the ancestors of today's humans was aroused after finding stone age tools. In 1922 he began studying at Cambridge University and soon helped organize a paleontological expedition to Africa. In 1926 he graduated from Cambridge with a degree in anthropology and archeology , led several excavations in Africa and finally received a doctorate for his research in 1930. His first significant find was the jaw of a proconsul .

Research priorities

As early as 1930 he found bones that he believed were among the oldest known human ancestors. However, in the year after next he could not find the location, so that a planned review of the find's circumstances by a colleague was prevented.

In 1928 Louis Leakey married Frida Avern, an Englishwoman living in Africa. They had two children together, Priscilla Muthoni Leakey (* 1931) and Colin Louis Avern Leakey (1933-2018), who became an internationally known plant researcher and lived temporarily in Uganda. The marriage was divorced in 1936, since he had been living with the scientific illustrator Mary Nicol since 1933 , whom he married immediately after the divorce. The scandal surrounding this change of partner and the unexplained circumstances of his bones found in 1930 undermined his previously promising career in Cambridge. Without a steady income, he got by in England with lectures and essays, but returned to Africa in 1937 to carry out a large-scale ethnological study of the culture of the Kikuyu tribe.

In 1941 Leakey initially became a part-time and unpaid employee in what would later become the Kenya National Museum (today: Nairobi National Museum ), and from 1945 he received a poorly paid job as a curator, but was able to continue his paleontological and archaeological work in Kenya. In 1947 he organized the First Pan-African Congress on the Prehistory of the Continent, which made a major contribution to gradually restoring his battered scientific reputation.

Together with his wife Mary, he organized excavations in various places in Africa, but especially in the Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania . After Mary found a fossil in 1959 that was named Zinjanthropus boisei (today: Paranthropus boisei ) and passed off by Louis Leakey as the ancestor of man despite its great resemblance to Australopithecus , its international fame grew from year to year. The climax of his career was finally reached in 1964, when another find and much more plausible ancestor of man was given the name Homo habilis by him (together with Phillip Tobias and John Russell Napier ) . Kenyapithecus africanus (later renamed Equatorius africanus ), whose genus Kenyapithecus and the new species Kenyapithecus wickeri had been introduced by Leakey in 1962 , joined his spectacular finds as early as 1961 . Through his discoveries, Leakey made a significant contribution to underpinning Darwin's assumption that mankind originated in Africa.

Louis Leakey was convinced that the roots of the genus Homo can be linked to the evidence of stone tools and thus shaped the idea, which is still widespread today, that the use of tools made the prehistoric man real. Even the use of tools by chimpanzees , later documented by Jane Goodall, has so far done little to change this popular idea. In research circles, however, there is serious discussion today about whether Homo habilis should really be assigned to the genus Homo .

In addition to searching for pre- human bones , Leakey was also interested in African archaeological sites and amassed a large collection of Stone Age obsidian tools. He also discovered some outstanding primeval wall paintings.

Louis Leakey died of a heart attack in 1972 on the way to a lecture in London. Although many interpretations of his findings were controversial, he was recognized and respected by his peers as one of the greats in the field of paleoanthropology.

In 1958 he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the British Academy . In 1969 he received the Prestwich Medal of the Geological Society of London . The Leakey crater is named after him.

Fonts (selection)

literature

  • Sibylle Knauss: Eden . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 3455401449 .
  • Roger Lewin: Bones of contention. Controversies in the search for human origin. Touchstone, 1987, ISBN 0-671-52688-X .
  • Virginia Morell : Ancestral Passions. The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings. Simon & Schuster, New York 1995, ISBN 0-684-80192-2 .
  • J. Desmond Clark: Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, 1903-1972 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 59 , 1974, pp. 447-471 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 27, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Leakey, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kenyan paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Kabete mission near Nairobi
DATE OF DEATH 1st October 1972
Place of death London