Born in Africa

LIKE RAYMOND DART and Robert Broom, Louis Leakey was regarded by the scientific establishment as a maverick, best kept at a safe distance. His early career as a field scientist had been full of promise, but he had since become immersed in controversy and scandal. No one doubted his energy, enthusiasm and talent, but colleagues found him too impetuous, too dogmatic, too intolerant of criticism, too much of a showman.

The son of an English missionary, born in 1903 on a mission station at Kabete in the hills above Nairobi, Leakey had grown up among the Kikuyu people, imbibing Kikuyu customs and folklore. At the age of thirteen, he had been initiated as a member of the Mukanda age group. ‘In language and in mental outlook I was more Kikuyu than English’, he wrote in his book White African, ‘and it never occurred to me to act other than as a Kikuyu’. Chief Koinange of the Kikuyu spoke of him as ‘the blackman with a white face’, accepting him as ‘one of ourselves’.

Leakey also acquired an early fascination with stone tools. His interest was prompted by a book on the ‘Stone Age Men’ of Britain, sent to him by a cousin in England as a Christmas present when he was twelve. Reading about how they had used flint arrowheads and axe heads, he set out to see if he could find some around Kabete. He had no clear idea what flints looked like, only that they were blackish in colour. Exploring road cuttings and other areas of exposed ground, he soon collected a mass of black flakes of rock that seemed to correspond to the flint tools he had read about. But his parents were sceptical and referred to them as ‘broken bottles’. His Kikuyu friends were also doubtful. Noticing how black flakes appeared on the ground after heavy bouts of rain, their explanation was that they had fallen from the sky; they called them nyenji cia ngoma—razors of the spirits of the sky.

Leakey eventually resolved to show his collection to Arthur Loveridge, the curator of the Nairobi Museum. He arrived fearing that Loveridge too might laugh at him but was ‘delighted beyond words’ by his response. Loveridge explained that his stones were not flint but obsidian—a black volcanic glass that produced a sharp cutting edge when flaked—and that obsidian was known to have been used for toolmaking in the past. Indeed, said Loveridge, several of the specimens in Leakey’s collection had undoubtedly been fashioned for tool use. From that moment, Leakey became addicted to prehistory.

Sent to school in England at the age of sixteen, Leakey endured two miserable years there, making few friends, but managed to gain a place at Cambridge to study anthropology. He impressed fellow students at Cambridge with his energy, enthusiasm and passion for prehistory but was also noted for being brash and impetuous—‘overcharged and unbalanced and unlikely to make good’, according to one contemporary.

During his university years he gained valuable field experience spending eight months in southeast Tanganyika with a British Museum expedition hunting for fossils at Tendaguru, the site where Hans Reck’s team had discovered the remains of a Braciosaurus in 1912. He also excelled in studies of anthropology and archaeology, becoming all the more convinced that Africa was the place to search for the origins of humankind, not Asia.

Shortly after graduating with a ‘double first’ in 1926, he set out on what he grandly called the East African Archaeological Expedition, to look for human fossils in Kenya. A Cambridge professor tried to dissuade him: ‘Don’t waste your time. There’s nothing of significance to be found there. If you really want to spend your life studying early man, do it in Asia’. But Leakey was adamant. ‘No’, he replied. ‘I was born in East Africa, and I’ve already found traces of early man there. Furthermore, I’m convinced that Africa, not Asia, is the cradle of mankind’.

The East African Archaeological Expedition, financed by a variety of grants, consisted of Leakey and one assistant. For a year Leakey explored caves and burial sites among the lakes and volcanoes of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, collecting a mass of stones and bones. His account of the expedition—‘Stone Age Man in Kenya Colony’—appeared in Nature in July 1926, earning him recognition within the scientific community.

Back in England, Leakey fell under the spell of Sir Arthur Keith, spending hours working on fossil material at his laboratories at the Royal College of Surgeons. As Keith’s disciple, he became an ardent advocate of the ‘big-brain’ theory of human development, arguing that because the human brain could only have developed to such a size over a prolonged period, the separation of humans from apes must have occurred far back in antiquity, as far back as the beginning of the Miocene period, then dated at about 1 million years ago. Leakey also supported Keith’s contentions about the validity of Piltdown Man.

After raising funds for a second, larger expedition, Leakey returned to Kenya in 1928, accompanied by his newly married wife, Frida Avern, focusing again on Rift Valley sites. Throwing himself tirelessly into the work, he made significant discoveries of stone tools, including ancient hand-axes, and managed to piece together for the first time a sequence of prehistoric cultures in Kenya.

Yet his Cambridge mentors sometimes fretted about his propensity for grandstanding and overstatement. On learning that Leakey intended to attend a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Johannesburg in 1929, Alfred Haddon warned him in a letter: ‘Do not go in for wild hypotheses. These won’t do your work any good and it’s foolish to try to make a splash’. A distinguished East African geologist, E. J. Wayland, cautioned him against making ‘over-emphatic’ comments. ‘Believe me you will serve archaeology, the expedition and yourself best by maintaining a strictly scientific attitude’, he wrote in a letter. ‘You have the chance of making yourself, in time, one of the leaders of archaeological thought—don’t spoil your chances, for by doing so you will unintentionally let the science down’.

On this occasion, Leakey heeded their advice, delivering a restrained account of his work. To his delight, he found himself the centre of attention, while Raymond Dart and his Taung fossil stirred little interest.

No sooner had Leakey returned to England to widespread acclaim than he began to plan for his third expedition. His main objective this time was to solve the mystery of Oldoway Man, the skeleton that Hans Reck had discovered in Olduvai Gorge in 1913. Leakey had first studied Oldoway Man during a visit to Munich in 1927, and he went back there in 1929 to examine it further. The conclusion he reached was that it was not as ancient as Reck claimed but was of similar age to some of the human skeletons he had found during his expeditions in Kenya—Late Stone Age specimens dating back no more than 20,000 years.

Leakey discussed the matter with Reck in Berlin and invited him to join the expedition. Reck eagerly accepted, but he remained adamant about the ancient origins of Oldoway Man. Examining Reck’s collection of Olduvai rocks and fossils, Leakey noticed similarities to stone tools he had picked up in Kenya and suggested that they might find other examples at Olduvai. But Reck disagreed. He had searched the area diligently for stone tools over a period of three months, he said, and found none. But Leakey persisted. ‘I ... made a small bet that I would find Stone Age implements at Oldoway within 24 hours of arriving there’. The wager was for £10—‘a not inconsiderable part of my research funds for that year’.

Leakey’s third expedition set out from Nairobi in September 1931. The 260-mile journey to Olduvai, along rough tracks and across unmapped stretches of the Serengeti Plains, took four days. As the convoy of vehicles approached the gorge, Leakey and Reck took the lead. ‘Reck could hardly hide the emotion he was feeling at once more returning to the scene of his very great scientific discoveries’, wrote Leakey. At first light, the next morning, while others slept, Leakey set off in search of stone tools. From his Kenya experience, he knew that stone tools were likely to be made not from flint, as Reck had tried to find, but from volcanic lava, chert or quartz. He soon found a perfect specimen of a hand-axe. ‘I was nearly mad with delight and I rushed back with it into camp’. Within four days, seventy-seven more hand-axes were collected.

Exhilarated by the find, Leakey went on to inspect the site in Bed II, where Reck had discovered Oldoway Man. By good fortune, four wooden pegs that Reck had used to mark the site were still in place. Reck recounted how he had found the skeleton, insisting that it was not merely a recent burial, as Leakey and others had argued, but was as old as Bed II itself. Leakey was soon persuaded that Reck was right. In high spirits, Leakey, Reck and Arthur Hopwood, a British Museum palaeontologist, sat down to compile a report to Nature supporting Reck’s original conclusion about the age of the skeleton. One week after arriving at Olduvai, Leakey was on his way back to Nairobi, convinced that his expedition had solved the mystery of Oldoway Man. In a short article he wrote for the London Times, before returning to Olduvai, he claimed that it was ‘almost beyond question’ that Oldoway Man was ‘the oldest known authentic skeleton of Homo sapiens’.

For two months, the run of discoveries continued. Leakey described Olduvai as ‘a veritable paradise for the prehistorian as well as for the palaeontologist’. His team recovered hand-axes from all five beds in the gorge, providing him with ‘a complete sequence of evolutionary stages of the hand-axe culture’. In the oldest bed—Bed I—they found ‘pebble tools’, simple flakes struck off pebbles, which came from the earliest known culture in the world, named by Leakey as the Oldowan.

But the harsh conditions at Olduvai were a constant problem. Water was in short supply and had to be rationed. A strong wind blew incessantly, carrying with it swirls of fine black dust. Leakey wrote:

If you spread some semi-liquid sun-melted butter on a piece of bread it would be covered with fine black dust before you could get it to your mouth. If you poured out a cup of tea or coffee in a few minutes it had a fine black scum of dust on its surface. You breathed dust-laden air, your nostrils were filled with dust, you ate dust, drank dust, slept in dust-ridden bedding, and in fact everything was dust, dust, dust! The heat of the sun was terrific; and if you had a tendency to perspire at all you did so very freely, and the dust mingled with the sweat to make your body filthy. And yet water was so scarce ...

After sorting out his collection in Nairobi, Leakey set out on another expedition, this time to fossil sites at Kanjera in western Kenya, eight miles from Lake Victoria. The conditions were different, but just as arduous. The area was frequently drenched by heavy downpours. ‘Whereas the constant trouble at Oldoway had been “not enough water”’, wrote Leakey, ‘here our trouble was too much of it’. Hordes of mosquitoes swarmed around the camp site at night.

Sometimes they were so bad after dark that it was really difficult to feed ourselves at supper time. We used to wear long trousers tucked into Wellington boots to protect our legs, and tie towels round our heads leaving only the mouth, nose and eyes exposed, but even so we were terribly bitten, and on one occasion one of us killed over a hundred mosquitoes on his face during one meal.

Within a matter of weeks, Leakey and his team made two significant discoveries: fragments of two skulls from Kanjera and part of a jaw from a site at Kanam, three miles away. The Kanam mandible was found in a block of rock dug out of the side of a gully on 29 March by one of Leakey’s African assistants, Juma Gitau, who earlier that day had recovered the tooth of a Deinotherium, an extinct type of elephant, from an adjacent spot in the same cliff.

Leakey was confident that the mandible was extremely old, dating back to early Pleistocene times, more than 500,000 years. He lost no time in alerting the outside world to his discovery, sending a despatch to Nature on 19 April.

‘The importance of this Kanam mandible’, Leakey wrote in a subsequent book, The Stone Age Races of Kenya, ‘lies in the fact that it can be dated geologically, palaeontologically and archaeologically, and that it represents the oldest known human fragment yet found in the African continent ... It is not only the oldest known human fragment from Africa, but the most ancient fragment of true Homo yet discovered anywhere in the world’.

Leakey earned high praise for his expeditions in East Africa. At a meeting in Cambridge in March 1933, when a group of twenty-six scientists gathered to review his work, Leakey was congratulated for the ‘exceptional significance’ of his discoveries. The London Times, reporting on the outcome of the meeting, suggested that Leakey’s work had lent plausibility to the theory that ‘Africa is the cradle of the human race’.

The first dent to his reputation came from the findings of independent geologists who made a series of tests on Oldoway Man and the surrounding soil samples where it had been found. Their conclusion was that the body had been buried in Bed II in comparatively recent times. (Subsequent Carbon-14 tests dated the skeleton to 19,000 years ago.)

Despite the evidence, Leakey fought on for months in defence of his views. ‘He made a bit of a fool of himself by his vehement insistence’, recalled John Solomon, a geologist colleague. ‘It showed that his attitude in those years was not that of a “scientist”, but of an “enthusiast”’.

A far more damaging controversy erupted over the Kanam mandible. In 1934, an eminent geologist, Percy Boswell, Professor of Geology at Imperial College, London, arrived at the sites at Kanjera and Kanam to inspect Leakey’s fieldwork. A stickler for detail, Boswell had been sceptical from the outset about Leakey’s claims. He had previously played a leading role in demolishing Leakey’s arguments about the age of Oldoway Man. To allay his concerns, Leakey invited him to visit the Kenya sites while he was there on his fourth expedition.

For Leakey, the trip proved to be a disaster. He found difficulty in identifying the exact location of the discoveries made three years before. Not only had he failed to make proper geological maps at the time, but iron pegs that he had cemented into the ground to mark the spot had meanwhile been removed by local fishermen to make fishing harpoons and spears. The landscape, moreover, had been altered by erosion from heavy rainfall.

Even worse, a photograph that Leakey had used to illustrate the position of the Kanam mandible turned out to record not the mandible site itself but another location several hundred yards distant. Leakey’s own camera had malfunctioned in 1932, so afterward he had borrowed a friend’s photograph instead. When the friend remarked: ‘I am not sure that this is the exact spot’, Leakey is said to have replied, ‘Near enough’. The photograph had been displayed at an exhibition at the Royal College of Surgeons, alongside the jaw fragment. It was due to be published on the opening page of Leakey’s forthcoming book, The Stone Age Races of Kenya. In haste, Leakey was obliged to cable Oxford University Press asking the publisher to hold distribution of the book until an erratum slip had been inserted.

Boswell was distinctly unimpressed. ‘The Professor is in a bad humour over it’, Leakey recorded in his diary. On his return to England, Boswell sent a scathing account to Nature, published in March 1935, not only accusing Leakey of incompetence but implying he had fabricated evidence. ‘It is regrettable that the records are not more precise’, Boswell concluded, ‘and it is disappointing after the failure to establish any considerable geological age for Oldoway Man ... that uncertain conditions of discovery should also force me to place Kanam and Kanjera man in a “suspense account”’.

Leakey returned to England in September 1935, his reputation severely damaged. He incurred further opprobrium after forsaking his wife, Frida, and their two children to live ‘in sin’ with a talented young illustrator, Mary Nicol. Divorce proceedings added to his notoriety. His Cambridge college terminated his research fellowship and the university authorities made clear they were not willing to consider him for an academic post. In dire financial straits, Leakey accepted an offer from the Rhodes Trust to undertake a detailed study of the Kikuyu people.