Leakey, Louis and Mary

For louis and mary leakey, the question of humanity's nature is precisely related to human origins. Humanity has a scientific definition, a definition that is directly connected to humanity's evolution and its manipulation of the environment. According to Louis Leakey, “during the slow course of physical evolution it would be impossible to say positively ‘this is where the pre-human creature ceased to be sub-human and became a man’ unless we have an agreed definition of what we mean by man.” For this reason Louis Leakey defined man simply as a “creature belonging to the primate stock which had reached a stage where it actually made tools, as distinct from merely using suitable natural objects as tools.”

There are two astonishing things about this definition. First, it describes humanity as a primate, an animal. Second, it describes humanity as a product of its distinct relationship with the environment: the making of tools. Through their tireless excavations in the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya, Mary and Louis Leakey provided striking proof of humanity's origins as a tool-making primate; an animal connected to nature through millions of years of evolution, but also separated from the environment through conscious manipulation and manufacture of simple stone tools: the first “artificial” products.

Louis Leakey was born to missionaries in British East Africa—now known as Kenya—in 1903. He was fascinated by fossils from a young age. After attending Cambridge he set out to prove Darwin's idea that humans first emerged from Africa, not [Page 1036]Asia, as it was then assumed. From 1926 he excavated at the Olduvai Gorge, a chasm that was once a lakebed and a perfect environment for finding ancient hominid settlements and bones.

After decades of excavation without any definitive human fossil finds, Louis Leakey married Mary Nicol in 1936. As a team Mary and Louis discovered several man-made tools and the prehuman jawbone of a creature called Proconsul. In 1959 Mary Leakey made an amazing discovery of Zinjanthropus—or Australopithecus boisei—which made the Leakeys world famous. The Leakeys speculated the fossil to be at least 600,000 years old; recent carbon-14 dating has pushed back the date of the fossil to an astonishing 1.75 million years.

In 1978 Mary made another astonishing discovery of three-and-a-half-million-year-old footprints of two hominid adults and a child in Tanzania. These were probably the same species as the famous Lucy skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson. The Leakeys made further groundbreaking discoveries in Africa of Homo habilis, “handy man” and Homo erectus, “upright man” that have profoundly shaped current understanding of human origins. Their son Richard and even their granddaughter have continued the family tradition in paleoanthropology. Louis Leakey died in 1972. Mary died in 1996 at the age of 83.