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 Asian beginnings, their discoveries placing man’s birthplace in East Africa some 3.5 million years ago.
Leakey was born near Nairobi in 1903, the oldest child of British missionaries sent to live among the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest tribe. He learned the tribal language before he could understand English and his playmates were Kikuyu children.
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