OPINION

Opinion: Fossil hunter helped date origins of modern humans

Allan M. Winkler
Opinion contributor
Richard Leakey, Kenyan wildlife conservationist, places a rhino horn to be burned at the zoo in Dvur Kralove, Czech Republic, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017. Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, known for his fossil-finding and conservation work in his native Kenya, has died at 77. His death was announced Sunday, Jan. 2, 2022 by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. The cause of death was not announced.

Richard Leakey, the world-famous paleontologist responsible for some of the most important fossil finds, died at the age of 77 this past Sunday.

Born in Kenya to equally famous parents – Louis and Mary Leakey – he never graduated from college but made his mark with his discovery of skulls and skeletons that helped date the origins of modern humans and defined the parameters of human evolution. 

Mary Leakey had long before discovered footprints in rocky ground that proved that early man walked upright. Louis Leakey made his own equally impressive discoveries and mentored a host of young men and women who followed in his footsteps.

Richard Leakey first became interested himself in 1967 when he flew over Lake Turkana, a desolate, moon-like region of northern Kenya, and saw fossils that he was determined to uncover.

One of his best-known finds came in 1984, when he unearthed the 1.6 million-year-old skeleton of a creature called Homo Erectus, which he called Turkana Boy. Another skull, discovered 8 years later, extended our knowledge of that species several million years into the past.

But Leakey was more than just a paleoanthropologist. He became director of the Kenya National Museums, which in time featured a stunning display, one of the best in the world, of his finds and those of his colleagues and contemporaries.

And then he became the irascible head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, at a time when Kenya’s elephants were threatened with extinction. Poachers, out to collect as much ivory as they could, were killing elephants right and left, and decimating what had once been huge herds. Leakey ordered his rangers to shoot on sight, collected all the poached ivory – and then in 1989 burned it in a huge bonfire consuming 12 tons of ivory, to demonstrate to the poachers and to the world – that there was no commercial advantage to collecting it.

I learned of the ivory bonfire at about the time I began going to Kenya with my wife in the early 1990s. I knew how Leakey antagonized some people, among them President Daniel arap Moi, who fired him from many of his positions. Enemies were also responsible for sabotaging the small plane he piloted, which crashed and led to him losing both of his legs below the knee.

As a reporter for Life magazine, Stolley traveled all over the world. Here, he stands beside the anthropologist Richard Leakey in Kenya.

But Leakey refused to be daunted. He remained active in Kenyan reform politics, challenging the power of the president, and sounded enormously hopeful when I interviewed him twice, first in 1996 and then again the next year. "There are changes in the pipeline," he told me, and went on to say, "there’s no such thing as never in this game."

Much to my surprise, and everyone else’s, the president appointed him as head of the nation’s public service, figuring he was the only one strong enough and tough enough to deal with the corruption endemic in Kenyan society. I happened to be in Kenya at the time, and emailed him a quick note of congratulations, which, to my surprise, he found time to answer. Leakey did manage to start the necessary cleanup, and made a difference, though in time, the president changed his mind, and Leakey lost that job as well.

Leakey was a tireless promoter of the need for further fossil discoveries to enhance our knowledge of the contours of human evolution. I heard him lecture brilliantly in Cincinnati some 25 years ago, and a while after that I heard his wife Meave Leakey, speak at Miami University, when he became involved in national politics and she took over the mantle of paleontological science.

Leakey was known around the world. He was on the cover of Time magazine in 1977.  He was the focus of a 1981 BBC program called "The Making of Mankind." He remained energetic despite assorted ailments, one of which entailed a kidney transplant from his brother, and continued to walk on prostheses for years after he lost his legs. In the process, he mentored a generation or more of Kenyans, and scientists around the world, in helping us understand so well the origins of our ancestors.

Allan M. Winkler is a history professor emeritus at Miami University.

Allan Winkler