Leakey, Louis (Seymour Bazett) (1903-1972)

British archaeologist, anthropologist, and palaeontologist. With his wife Mary Leakey, he discovered gigantic extinct-animal fossils in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, as well as many remains of an early human type. Leakey's conviction that human origins lie in Africa was opposed to contemporary opinion. Leakey was born in Kabete, Kenya, and studied in the UK at Cambridge. Between 1926 and 1937 he led a series of archaeological research expeditions to E Africa. He was curator of Coryndon Museum, Nairobi, Kenya, 1945-61, and one of the founder trustees of the Kenya National Parks and Reserves. In 1961 he founded the National Museum Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology. Leakey began excavations at Olduvai Gorge in 1931. With Mary Leakey, he discovered a site in the Rift Valley of the Acheulian culture, which flourished between 1 million and 100,000 years ago. The Leakeys also found the remains of 20-million-year-old apes on an island in Lake Victoria. In 1960 they discovered the remains of Homo habilis, 1.7 million years old, and the skull of an Acheulian hand-axe user, Homo erectus, which Leakey maintained was on the direct evolutionary line of Homo sapiens, the modern human. In 1961 at Fort Ternan, Kenya, he found jawbone fragments of another early primate, believed to be 14 million years old. His books for a general readership include Stone Age Africa 1936 and White African 1937.