Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903 – 1972) African-Born English Paleontologist and Anthropologist
Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was born on August 7, 1903, in Kabete, Kenya. His parents, Mary Bazett (d. 1948) and Harry Leakey (1868–1940) were Church of England missionaries at the Church Missionary Society, Kabete, Kenya. Louis spent his childhood in the mission, where he learned the Kikuyu language and customs (he later compiled a Kikuyu grammar book). As a child, while pursuing his interest in ornithology—the study of birds—he often found stone tools washed out of the soil by the heavy rains, which Leakey believed were of prehistoric origin. Stone tools were primary evidence of the presence of humans at a particular site, as toolmaking was believed at the time to be practiced only by humans and was, along with an erect posture, one of the chief characteristics used to differentiate humans from nonhumans. Scientists at the time, however, did not consider East Africa a likely site for finding evidence of early humans; the discovery of Pithecanthropus in Java in 1894 (the socalled Java Man, now considered to be an example of Homo erectus) had led scientists to assume that Asia was the continent from which human forms had spread.
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