You may have noticed on our Tanzania itineraries many references to the Leakeys and Olduvai Gorge and wondered who they were and why they are famous.
Louis Leakey was a British anthropologist and naturalist who lived and worked in East Africa in the early half of the 20th century and whose work was vitally important in establishing human evolutionary development in Africa. Louis Leakey also played a major role in creating organizations for future research in Africa and for protecting wildlife there, working with both Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall.
Leakey was born to missionary parents and spent his childhood in Kenya learning about local wildlife and customs whilst living with the Kikuyu tribes. On return to England he went to university in Cambridge where he then took an interest in early history and mankind and decided to specialise in both anthropology and archaeology. He was sent to Tanzania to assist on the famous dinosaur dig at Tendaguru. On graduation he was such a respected figure that Cambridge sent him back to East Africa to study prehistoric African humans. He excavated dozens of sites, undertaking for the first time a systematic study of the artifacts.
He became involved with the site at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania where early human remains had already been discovered by Professor Reck. As the rock bed was 600,000 years old so too must be the fossilised bones of early man discovered there. This discovery caused a huge upset amongst the general public as mankind was believed to have arrived much, much later, and Reck was discredited as few were prepared to believe him. Leakey then took over the dig when the Germans ceded the territory to the British at the end of the war.
Louis and his second wife Mary spent most of the 1950s excavating at Olduvai Gorge and found many fossils and early tools. In 1959 the OH5 (also known as the Nutcracker Man) skull was unearthed by Mary. Louis also believed that it was of a species ancestral to modern humans that he eventually dubbed Zinjanthropus boisei (East Africa man). Zinj is an ancient Arabic word for the East African coast; anthropus refers to the fossil’s humanlike characteristics; and boisei refers to Charles Boise, who had been making financial contributions to the Leakeys’ work since 1948.
Louis initially believed Zinj to be a direct ancestor of modern humans (which he published in the National Geographic) and the maker of those tools found near its remains, but he withdrew this idea once he and Mary unearthed Homo habilis which had a larger brain in the same area less than two years later. Despite that, OH 5 made the Leakeys famous and brought more attention to the developing field of paleanthropology.
Later on two young geophysicists dated the rock bed and therefore the hominid fossils in the Olduvai Gorge to 1.75 million years. A truly stunning discovery that meant that Zinj was far older than anyone had ever imagined. Louis Leakey had proved Charles Darwin’s theory right with concrete evidence – a major scientific breakthrough.
