Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett

Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett (băz`ət, lē`kē), 1903–72, British archaeologist and anthropologist of E Africa, b. Kabete, Kenya; father of Richard Leakey. His fossil discoveries in E Africa demonstrated that humans were far older than had previously been suspected. Leakey, the son of missionary parents, grew up among the Kikuyu people of Kenya. After studying at Cambridge Univ., he began his archaeological research in E Africa in 1924. Leakey was curator of the Coryndon Museum of Nairobi (1945–61), after which he did research and taught in Africa, England, and the United States. In 1959, Mary Leakey, his wife, discovered in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, a hominid fossil (Zinjanthropus) believed to be 1,750,000 years old. In 1961 Leakey unearthed another fossil (Homo habilis) at Olduvai, which he believed to be a more direct ancestor of Homo sapiens. His writings include The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (1931), Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (1952), and Adam's Ancestors (4th ed. 1953; repr. 1960).

Bibliography

See V. Morell, Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings (1995).

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Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett 

Born Aug. 7, 1903, in Kabete, Kenya; died Oct. 1, 1972, in London. British archaeologist and anthropologist.

In 1927–29, Leakey excavated Gamble’s Cave and established the relative chronology of a number of East African archaeological cultures. In 1930 he excavated the Neolithic Njoro Cave. Beginning in 1951 he studied rock drawings in Tanzania. Of great significance are his discoveries in 1959–60 in Olduvai Gorge of the bone remains of the fossil primates Zinjanthropus and pre-Zinjanthropus, as well as the skull of a man resembling the Java Pithecanthropus.

WORKS

The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony. Cambridge, 1931.
The Stone Age Races of Kenya. London, 1935.
Stone Age Africa. London, 1936.
Olduvai Gorge 1951–1961, vols. 1–2. Cambridge, 1965–67. (Vol. 2 in collaboration with P. W. Tobians.)