Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, who worked in Africa with the Leakeys, says Louis will always be 'larger than life in this field. 'There was no single trunk rising from apes to modern humans, but a thicket of branches, each one an experiment in evolution,' Joyce reports. Richard found the Turkana boy, the most complete skeleton of an early human. Mary found fossil footprints three-and-a-half-million years old. By the time Louis died in 1972, his wife Mary and his son were doing the digging. Louis grew interested in the great apes, and launched the careers of primatologists such as Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. Prior to that there had been no age for these creatures.'Īs Richard Leakey adopted the family profession, his father left it. Richard Leakey, the son of Louis and Mary, explains the excitement that surrounded the find: 'I think it was the association of the dates and the implements that fired public imagination. 'Olduvai Gorge gives us one of the most remarkable stories of the past - the last chapter of the Earth's history, starting at the present day, right away back 2 million years,' Louis Leakey told a National Geographic Society film crew on a visit to the site in 1966. A year later, they discovered Homo habilis, or 'handy man.' It was by far the earliest known human ancestor, and Louis Leakey believed it to be the first true toolmaker. There, in 1959, Louis and his wife Mary found human bones dating back almost 2 million years. To prove it, he went to the Olduvai Gorge in southern Tanzania. Interviews with Richard and Louise Leakey He raised eyebrows among British academics in the late 1920s by insisting that humans evolved in Africa - contradicting the conventional wisdom that they emerged from Asia or Europe. Louis Leakey was born in Kenya and educated in England. For National Geographic Radio Expeditions, NPR's Christopher Joyce reports on the legacy of the Leakey family patriarch. The late Louis Leakey, born 100 years ago today, started a dynasty of fossil hunters who still explore the sediments of East Africa. The Leakey family is synonymous with the search for the origins of humankind. Gordon Church, courtesy Safaris Unlimited Meave, left, and Louise Leakey at Koobi Fora, Kenya.

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